


No matter how far you go, I'll never be far from you

by EarthboundCosmonaut



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Ambrose gets a little bit of backstory, Angst, Bloomsbury Set cameos, Canon typical horror writer name checks, Colonial era Hong Kong, Did I Mention Angst?, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Faustus Blackwood has always been a little bitch, Gen, Hilda is a pure sweet bean, I think I'm really angry about part 3..., I'm not sure where all this is coming from, I've had to research a lot more history than I was expecting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, In the 1840s Hilda has a girlfriend, Memories, Mystery, Patricide, Pre-Canon, Revenge, Russia, Sisters, Swooning on the Yorkshire Moors, There's a lot more to Hilda than meets the eye, Vinegar Tom is briefly seen in goblin form, Vinegar Tom is possibly the MVP, Zelda Spellman Needs A Hug, Zelda Spellman is Bad at Feelings, Zelda is an emotional coward, rasputin - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 32,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22441936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthboundCosmonaut/pseuds/EarthboundCosmonaut
Summary: It was no different to all those times before Hilda’s dark baptism when she had waved her siblings off to school for the week. Except that this time, the last flash of Zelda’s flaming hair before the trap was swallowed by the tree line would haunt her dreams for decades to follow.When Hilda was twenty, her sister Zelda travelled to Europe. She was gone for more than 150 years. This is the story of how Hilda found her and brought her home.
Relationships: Hilda Spellman & Zelda Spellman
Comments: 114
Kudos: 124





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story started out as me wondering what dark devotion the Dark Lord asked of Zelda. It seemed in 2x2 that whatever it was, Zelda was still so upset by it that she couldn't even bring herself to talk about it. It felt in character to me that instead of dealing with her feelings about it she might just disappear for a century or so and wallow in self-destructive guilt instead.
> 
> This is poor confused Hilda's side of the story. Because I can either think about my extremely mixed feelings about part 3 or I can lose myself in finishing one of the CAOS WIPs I have lurking on my hard drive.

Hilda was twenty when her sister left home. She was still a student at the Academy, struggling to master the intricacies of conjuring. Zelda had progressed as far in her academic studies as women were eligible to at the time. As their father had announced one evening after dinner “It is high time you learnt to do something useful, daughter. A witch’s role is to serve – a lesson you too often forget.”

The relationship between Zelda and their father had never been close, but it had deteriorated to a level that could barely be described as civil since their mother had died the year before. Nothing Zelda did pleased him. And Satan knew, Zelda tried. Hilda saw the effort she put into her studies, pouring over texts late into the night in order to master advanced techniques, and the way she threw herself into the life of the coven with devout zeal. Sometimes Zelda’s achievements were belittled – she was accused of being arrogant, vain and self-seeking. More often she was ignored all together. It was this that seemed to hurt Zelda the most, and she retaliated by needling and provoking their Father until he lashed out in anger.

Hilda would sit in bed and listen to the two of them arguing, their voices rising and rising until finally they bubbled over into crackles of magic and the crash of a body hitting something hard and immobile. Zelda never talked about it, but when they lay in their shared bed after one of these arguments, shrouded in the silence of night, Hilda would hold her in her arms and Zelda would burrow her face into her neck.

Zelda came to bed late the evening of their father’s pronouncement. Her skin was cold from the night air and she smelt of the forest. “Have you been outside?” Hilda asked as Zelda undressed, tugging at the laces of her stays with clawed fingers. Angry bursts of static buzzed in the air around her.

“Here, let me,” Hilda told her, batting her hands way. “You’ll tear your shift if you’re not careful.”

Zelda huffed, but she stood still and allowed Hilda to gently loosen the laces.

“He’s sending me to England,” Zelda told her.

“To England?” Hilda exclaimed as she helped Zelda ease her stays over her head. “Why?”

“Charles has been appointed High Priest of the Church of the Morningstar. I am to keep house for him until he finds a suitable wife,” she said, her tone clipped and bitter.

“Oh,” murmured Hilda, digesting the news. Charles was their half-brother – their Father’s son by his first wife, born almost eighty years before Edward. Hilda and her siblings had never met him, although Charles’ achievements were often held up to them as examples. Examples that Edward effortlessly emulated and Zelda inevitably fell short of, although as far as Hilda could tell her siblings were equally matched in intelligence and magical ability. “Well that will be nice, won’t it? Meeting our brother? And England! Just imagine all the people you’ll meet and the things you’ll see.”

“I shan’t see any of them,” Zelda said, tucking her legs under the mound of blankets piled on their bed against the winter chill. “I shall be stuck in a house, polishing silverware and folding linen. And then, no doubt, Charles will betroth me to some grotesque old warlock and I’ll be forced to polish _his_ silverware and fold _his_ linen instead.”

“No, Zelds,” Hilda reassured her, climbing in beside her. “It won’t be like that at all. You are too brilliant to end up as some old warlock's housewife. England will be a wonderful adventure – it will be the making of you.”

Zelda gazed at her, her eyes glistening in the candlelight. “I shall miss you sister.”

“I shall miss you too. But it won’t be forever. Within a couple of years Charles will have found a wife and you will be back, making me jealous with tales of your travels.”

“Hmm,” Zelda hummed uncertainly.

Hilda reached for her hand under the blanket and clasped it reassuringly. “I promise it’ll be all right. Now, let’s get some sleep shall we? Tomorrow I’ll start work on a travelling dress for you. We must make sure you look your best when you arrive.”

Zelda raised their clasped hands to her lips and kissed the back of Hilda’s hand. “I don’t deserve you, sister.”

“Don't be silly,” Hilda chided her, snuffing out the candle. “Now go to sleep. Everything will look better in the morning, you'll see.”

* * *

If she had known she would be nearly a hundred and sixty before she saw her sister again, she would have taken longer over her goodbye. She would have held Zelda to her; inhaled her scent until she had detected its component elements and could recreate it in a potion; woven thick layers of protection spells around her; and whispered low so that only Zelda could hear. She would have whispered to her of how much she was loved. Promised her that _nothing_ she had ever done or could ever do could change the love Hilda felt for her.

But she hadn’t known. She was barely out of her teens, distracted by thoughts of whether there were enough apples left in the pantry to make apple Charlotte for pudding, and who would help her with her torturous conjuring studies while her sister was away. She had never spent more than a few nights apart from Zelda and she had no conception of what it would be like.

Years later, when she looked back on it, she didn’t believe that Zelda had known how long she would be away for either. She replayed the memory over and over in her mind – their quick embrace while their Father tapped his cane impatiently on the wooded floor, Zelda’s squeeze of her hand as Hilda passed her a basket of food for the journey, the last glance they shared as Father drove the trap towards the main road. It was no different to all those times before Hilda’s dark baptism when she had waved her siblings off to school for the week. Except that this time, the last flash of Zelda’s flaming hair before the trap was swallowed by the tree line would haunt her dreams for decades to follow.

* * *

Zelda spent nearly three years in England. Despite her fears of domestic drudgery, she seemed happy in the letters that she sent home. The Church of the Morningstar, based as it was in London, attracted a congregation of notable individuals. Zelda wrote of the soirees she had hosted for the High Priest and the fascinating people she had met. Charles encouraged her to study midwifery with one of the witches in the coven. It seemed to Hilda that their half-brother offered Zelda the encouragement and support that she had never received from their father.

In those days before the postal service letters were relayed by acquaintances. The journey to the New World was still a long and arduous one. They received at most half a dozen bundles of letters each year, carried by warlocks travelling on Church business. Each letter from Zelda brought a glimmer of excitement. Hilda would tuck them away in her pocket, touching the crisp paper like a talisman throughout the day. Then finally when she was shut away in her bedroom at night she would break the wax seal with a delicious rush of anticipation and force herself to read slowly, savouring her sister's words.

She wrote back – long letters describing the herb garden she had planted behind the house, the latest gossip from the coven and her progress at the Academy. She excelled in herbalism and potion brewing, but her conjuring remained so poor that eventually it was agreed that she would stop studying the subject all together and focus on the healing arts instead.

In 1776, a letter came from Charles to Father. Father grunted as he read the final paragraph, then read it aloud so that Hilda and Edward might hear too. _I fear Zelda has reached the limit of what she can learn from Sister Wilson, and she grows restless for new knowledge. I have arranged for her to stay with a family of my acquaintance in Paris, where she can study with a midwife to the royal court_.

“I don’t know why he wastes his time on that girl,” grumbled Father, tossing the letter onto the dining table.

“Is there a letter for me, Father?” Hilda asked him. Normally letters from Charles were accompanied by letters from Zelda, addressed to Hilda and Edward.

He shook his head. “No. It seems she has nothing to say for herself.”

There were no more letters from Zelda after that. Occasionally Charles relayed a line or two of second hand news in a post script – Zelda had received an appointment to the French royal court; a mutual acquaintance had met Zelda at Versailles and she seemed well. Other than that, nothing.

Hilda read and re-read Zelda’s old letters until the paper became limp and tore along the folds. At night she lay in bed and imagined her sister dancing at balls in beautiful palaces with gilded furniture and paintings on the ceilings. She wondered why Zelda didn’t write. Was she too busy? Had Hilda inadvertently written something to anger her? Or was it simply that, compared to the glamour of her new life, her homely sister and their small hometown no longer interested her? She fell asleep crying on the nights that this final thought wormed itself into her mind.


	2. Chapter 2

On Yule night 1787 Hilda awoke to find Zelda sitting on the edge of her bed, her skin glowing a luminous milky white in the light of the full moon.

At the sight of Hilda stirring Zelda startled, rising to her feet and stepping into the shadows. Still half asleep, Hilda reached out to catch her. “Zelda wait, don’t go!” Her hand passed straight through Zelda’s body, leaving her clutching a handful of night air.

Zelda’s eyes were wide and alarmed but she remained motionless. Hilda scrambled to sit up. “Please sister,” she begged, “stay with me a little while. I haven’t seen you in over ten years. I _miss_ you.”

Silhouetted against the moonlight flooding through the window, Zelda’s shoulders sagged. “I’ve missed you too,” she whispered.

Reassured that she wasn’t going to disappear straight away, Hilda beckoned to her. “Won’t you come a closer? I want to see you.”

“You know what I look like Hildie,” Zelda told her, not moving. “Tell me about yourself instead. How is your garden growing? Do you have a lover? Are you happy?”

“I would be happy if you came home,” Hilda told her plaintively.

Zelda shook her head. “This house is not my home.”

“Maybe not,” she acknowledged. “But aren’t I your home?” When Zelda didn’t reply she pressed on: “You’ve been gone for years Zelda, with not a word. Sometimes I wonder if you are still alive. Where have you been? What have you been doing?”

Zelda offered not even a word in response.

“For Satan’s sake, at least let me look at you! Have I offended you so badly that you won’t even allow me that!?” Hilda exclaimed in frustration, her voice rising to a pitch that sent her spiders skittering into the corners of the room.

They waited in silence for a moment, the vibrations of Hilda’s outburst rippling through the night air. Neither of them moved. Hilda held her breath, fearing that she had pushed too hard and Zelda would return to her body. But instead Zelda took a step forward, into the beam of moonlight falling through the window. “Look at me then.”

Hilda drank her in greedily. She wore a dress of golden brocade cut in a fashion that had not yet reached Greendale. A choker of garnet circled her neck and her hair, piled on top of her head and threaded with ribbon, glowed amber in the silvery light. She had scarcely aged in the years since Hilda had seen her last, but she seemed older somehow. The playfulness had disappeared from the curve of her lip.

“Oh,” sighed Hilda, sliding out of bed and standing before her. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.” Her hand ached to reach out and touch her, and she had to remind herself that Zelda wasn’t really there.

“You always did think too highly of me, sister,” Zelda told her, her voice cracking over the words.

“You’re my sister,” Hilda told her simply. _My flesh and blood. The one I have always admired. The one whose love matters to me more than any other’s_.

“And you are a woman now. It’s time for you to see me for what I really am.”

There was a flicker of a glamour fading. Hilda marvelled at the level of control it must take to maintain a glamour while astral projecting, until she saw what the glamour had been hiding. Zelda still wore her beautiful dress, but her hair hung loose and matted around her shoulders. Her throat was ringed not by a choker of garnet but a band of purple bruises, and more bruises shadowed her lip and cheekbone.

“Zelda!” Hilda’s hand flew to her mouth. “What has happened to you?”

Zelda’s expression remained stony. “Nothing more than I deserve.”

Hilda shook her head, tears pricking at her eyes. “Oh Zelda, how could you possibly—”

“Is our father still alive?”

Hilda nodded. “Shall I fetch him?”

Zelda shook her head. “He was right about me. He has always been able to see the rot – the corruption within. Would that you could see it too. Then you could forget about me.”

Hilda was as alarmed by the venomous tone in which her sister spoke about herself as her words. “Sister,” she implored, stepping closer so that only a few inches of frigid December air separated her and Zelda’s spectral body. “You’re not well. You must come home. Or tell me where you are, so that I can come to you. Please, I’m not complete without you.”

Zelda took a step back, into the shadows. “You could never offend me,” she whispered. Then she set her shoulders and raised her hand in blessing. In a deep, formal voice she intoned: “Happy solstice, sister. May Satan bless you and Lilith keep you safe from harm.”

And then she was gone. Hilda blinked and raised her hand to shield her eyes against the sudden bath of moonlight that engulfed her. “No wait, Zelds—”

Silence echoed back at her.

She slept no more that night but lay wide eyed, staring at the shadowy corner into which Zelda had melted as though she could will her back. When the first rays of dawn reached through the window she crept into Edward’s room and shook him awake.

“Edward, Edward. I’ve seen Zelda. She appeared to me last night. Something’s terribly wrong.”

Edward stared at her blearily, trying to make sense of her jumbled greeting. “It was a dream, Hilda. The Dark Lord blessed you with a solstice dream of a loved one.”

“No,” Hilda insisted. “It wasn’t a dream, not even a nightmare. She was here. She was hurt, and she talked of being rotten and corrupted and oh—” she pressed her fingers to her lips, pushing back the sobs that threatened to overspill. “She needs me, I know she does.”

Edward sat up and looked at her kindly. “Zelda is a young witch at the height of her powers. She is exploring - following the Path of Night where our Dark Lord wishes to lead her. She does not need any of us. But perhaps,” he suggested, seeing Hilda’s crestfallen expression, “perhaps it is time that you too had an opportunity to travel. The world holds far more than can be found in Greendale. Perhaps what your dream signified is that it is time for you too to find your own path, Hilda.”

Hilda gazed at him in mute surprise. With her mother dead and her sister gone, she had never even entertained the notion that she might be permitted to leave. “But who will look after you and Father?” she asked.

Edward chuckled. “Father is the High Priest. We shall hardly struggle to find a witch willing to take on the role of housekeeper. What do you say sister?” he asked. “Shall I speak to Father after black mass?”

“D’you think I – do you think Charles might let me stay with him in London?” she asked tentatively. If she could be where Zelda had been and meet the people she had met, perhaps she could discover more about what had become of her.

“I think that would be a most appropriate way to begin,” Edward said encouragingly. “Now get dressed, sister. It’s a feast day – there’s much to be done.”

* * *

And so Hilda travelled to London. She slept in the same bed that Zelda had, worshiped in the same church, studied midwifery with the same kind, patient old witch. Zelda’s magic lingered in the bed frame, and the dressing gown she had left hanging in the wardrobe, and the jars of herbs carefully labelled in her hand. But Zelda herself remained as elusive as ever.

Revolution swept through France and the Paris covens scattered and fled. Hilda sought out the emigrees who found their way to the Church of the Morningstar, asking them what they knew of a red-haired witch named Zelda who had served at the Bourbon court. A few knew her by sight or reputation. None knew what had happened to her. Perhaps she had fled to Hungary, or Austria. Perhaps she had gone into hiding – trading her skills as a healer and midwife for the protection of mortals. Perhaps she was one of the casualties of the violent unrest sweeping the country.

This last theory, at least, Hilda discounted. She felt sure she would know if Zelda had died – felt sure a part of her would break at the moment of her sister’s death and could never be made whole again. Zelda could not be dead, she was just gone.

* * *

She moved to Cornwall to study herbalism with a former student of Charles’. She struck up a friendship with the kitchen witch who kept house for him, learning how to infuse food with powerful spells. She walked by the sea and learnt to listen to the whispers of the landscape and watch for the subtle signs of the changing seasons. A world opened up to her that she could never have conceived of if she had stayed in Greendale. She understood for the first time how narrow and oppressive their Father’s house had been. She wondered if Zelda felt free.

Hilda’s fortieth birthday came and she realised with a pang that she had been separated from her sister for as long as they had been together. Twenty years was but a blink of an eye in the lifespan of a witch. In another twenty, would she still be the same person Zelda had known? There are days when she awakened convinced that Zelda had been there a moment earlier, then as sleep fell away she became confused as to whether it had been real or a dream. Most days though, she no longer thought of Zelda. As the decades went by, she struggled to summon an image of her sister to her conscious mind. Zelda seemed to be fading like smoke on the wind.

Her unconscious mind could still summon her though. She dreamt of Zelda often. Sometimes they were happy dreams in which the two of them worked side by side in the garden of their house in Greendale or walked together in the woods. More often her dreams were disturbing: Zelda being pursued through foreign cities; Zelda being surrounded by fearsome demons; Zelda being strangled by a warlock who loomed over her with barely contained hatred in his eyes. In all of them Hilda was frozen to the spot, unable to intervene. She would wake herself with the force of her silent screams.


	3. Chapter 3

The Satanic Church reached its zenith in the 19th century, but the witching community was still close-knit. When the midwife in a coven in Whitby died unexpectedly in the 1830s, the coven’s High Priest reached out to his brother priests to see whether any of them might know a midwife who would be willing to train her successor. Hilda’s High Priest in Trelissick asked her to consider the role.

“I believe you to be more than capable of the task,” he told her over tea and saffron buns in his study. “I do not expect an answer right away, Sister Hilda. It is a serious undertaking – one that you must take time to reflect on.”

Hilda stared into her teacup and discovered that she needed no time at all. “I’ll do it,” she told him.

Father Norris narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “It’s time for a change. I love it here, but – I realise that I have stopped learning. It’s time to experience something new.”

The High Priest placed his cup down on the desk. “Very well then. I will write to Father Stoker in Whitby and advise him that you will be ready to travel in…” he looked at her expectantly.

“I can leave on Friday,” Hilda told him. “No point hanging around,” she added in response to his raised eyebrow.

And so it was that Hilda moved to Whitby. She found that it was simpler than she would have anticipated to pack up nearly forty years of her life that she had spent in Cornwall. The majority of her herbs and potions she left with the herbalist who she had studied under, and the quilt she had sewn from her old dresses she offered as a keepsake to the kitchen witch she had befriended. In her medical case she carried her midwifery equipment and a few of the more complex potions and rare ingredients required for her trade. Her clothes and four decades’ books of shadows fitted in a trunk. How easy it was, she reflected, to leave a life behind. Was this how it was for Zelda, too?

* * *

It took the best part of three days to reach Whitby, including a terrifying ride in a machine called a steam locomotive. The last leg of her journey was in a coach sent by the High Priest. It was long after midnight by the time she arrived at the cottage formerly occupied by the old midwife.

Her apprentice had been standing watch at the window. As the carriage pulled to a stop she opened the front door and held aloft a lantern for the driver to see by as he unloaded Hilda’s luggage.

“Well met Sister. You must be Sister Hilda,” she said, her accent thick and soft.

“I am. What’s left of me anyway - it was rather a bumpy ride.”

“Aye, it’s a long way on a bad road. I’m Sarah Prentice.”

“Well met, Sister,” Hilda told her, returning the formal greeting. The air was damp with salt and noticeably colder than it had been in Cornwall.

“Let’s get inside” the witch said, as though reading her mind. "I’ve lit a fire in your chamber and there’s a bed pan heating the sheets."

Hilda followed her into the cottage. The little sitting room looked homely enough – at least what she could see of it by the light of the embers in the grate and Sister Sarah’s lantern.

“Have you any more luggage?” Sarah asked, eyeing the trunk and medical bag that the coachman had deposited in the living room.

“No that’s everything.”

Sarah nodded approvingly. “I’ve some cold cuts in the pantry if you’re hungry.”

“I’m too exhausted to eat,” Hilda said. “All I want is a nice warm bed.”

Sarah showed her to the bedroom at the back of the cottage and bade her goodnight. By the light of a candle Hilda stripped down to her undergarments and crawled under the sheets – warm from the bed pan, just as she had been promised.

She slept deeply and dreamlessly that first night, and awoke long after dawn. After she had washed and dressed she explored the cottage. It didn’t take long. The house was small and simply built: a main room, a bedroom, a little workshop and a kitchen. But the rooms had been freshly whitewashed and were comfortably furnished - it was clear that the community valued their midwife.

She wandered into the kitchen in search of the range and a kettle to make tea, and stopped short in the doorway. A woman stood on the far side of the room, watching over a pan on the stove. Flaming red hair flowed down her back and glinted in the morning light.

Her stomach clenched in recognition. For a moment she was back in Greendale more than half a century ago, watching her sister stir soup on the stove while their mother kneaded dough. “Zelda?” Hilda whispered.

“Oh Sister, you’re awake,” said Sarah Prentice, turning to face her. “I trust you slept well?”

In daylight she saw what she had not seen in the darkness the previous night: Sister Sarah was an exquisite creature with flawless white skin, finely chiselled features and a mane of strawberry blonde hair. Hilda stared at her, the shock of familiarity wearing off.

“Would you like some porridge?” she continued when Hilda gave no answer, her accent flattening the vowels.

“I—uh yes, thank you.”

They sat at the little table in the centre of the kitchen and ate a breakfast of porridge, tea and stewed plums. While they ate, Sarah told her of the coven. It covered a large area, with many members scattered out in farms and hamlets on the Moors. “We’ll travel mainly by broom to reach them,” she explained. “Though mebbe also by horse if mortals be about.”

Sarah herself came from one of these farms, the youngest daughter of a large witching family. She had a talent for birthing calves and lambs, and for harvesting herbs. When Sister Wendy, the midwife, had died, the High Priest had suggested to her parents that she might train to take over her position. “And a farm hand is easier to replace than a midwife, so they said yes,” Sarah explained matter of factly.

“And what about you?” asked Hilda. “Do you want to be a midwife?”

Sarah shrugged. “I shall miss the outdoors, but I reckon I’ll be more useful here.”

This pragmatism, Hilda came to discover in the weeks and months that followed, characterised Sarah’s approach to life. She had received little formal schooling, so under Hilda’s guidance she learnt reading, writing and Latin alongside herbalism, biology and potion brewing. They had no maid, so Sarah rose early from the cot she slept on by the range to cooks, sweep and launder before the working day began. When Hilda suggested she might find the sofa in the living room more comfortable, Sarah shook her head. “Mebbe more comfortable, but it’s warmer in the kitchen and I can listen out for mice in the pantry.”

She had a manner with patients that Hilda found startlingly straightforward, but it proved to be effective. It turned out that a mother sensing that a birth was going badly didn’t want platitudes and false reassurance: she wanted an explanation of the problem and a description of how the midwife proposed to manage it. Hilda felt herself growing more grounded and earthy the more time she spent with the young witch.

In the evenings they sat before the fire and talked. When there was no more to say about patients and the texts they were studying and coven gossip, the conversation flowed to legends, history and stories of their past. Sarah told Hilda of the hobgoblins and boggarts tied to the farm she had grown up on, and the corpse candles that hovered over the bogs in search of living souls for company,. Hilda told her of the enchanted Moon Valley and the cries of the Greendale Thirteen that could still be heard echoing through the forests on still nights. “I can picture it in my mind so clearly when you speak of it,” Sarah told her. “I should like to see it one day,”

“Perhaps you shall,” Hilda said. “Witches have long lives. Who knows where yours will take you?”

Sarah gazed at her solemnly for a moment, then shrugged. “Perhaps so. Mine has already brought me more than I imagined.”

For all the simplicity of her manner, Sarah was clever and quick-witted. Within a few years she had developed a knowledge of potions and herbalism that most witches would spend years cultivating. She seemed to instinctively grasp the correspondences of herbs and the manner in which they would interact. “Why don’t you add a drop of rosemary essence?” she suggested one day as Hilda brewed a calming potion for a mother whose babe had not been delivered safely.

Hilda nearly dismissed the idea out of hand – rosemary would energise and stimulate the mind: exactly the opposite of what she intended. But, she realised as she considered the suggestion, just a little might clear the mind of worrisome thoughts and create space for the calming agents to act.

“You’re a natural,” Hilda told her as she rubbed a spot of the balm onto her chest to test it. Peace radiated through her breastbone and flooded her mind with a pleasant softness. “Here, you try.”

She dipped her finger into the balm and Sarah unfastened the top button of her blouse so that Hilda could smooth a speck of balm into the warm skin just below her collar. “See how good that feels?

Sarah looked down at Hilda’s fingers where they disappeared beneath her clothing, then lifted her gaze to meet Hilda’s. “It feels good,” she agreed.

Her eyes were green flecked with gold, like moss on the moors. Hilda couldn’t believe that she had never noticed. Although she couldn’t recall ever standing this close before. Her fingertips tingled where they still rested against Sarah’s skin. She sighed.

Sarah wrapped her fingers gently around Hilda’s wrist, holding her hand in place where it still rested against her chest. Her fingertips were rough against the delicate skin. Hilda took a step towards her, drawn by the warmth and the tingling that the touch sent through her body. Sarah’s skin was translucent. She could see the life force pulsing through it, magic rippling through her blood like moonlight bouncing off the ocean. “You are beautiful,” Hilda sighed, marvelling at the sight.

Sarah closed the distance between them and kissed her.

* * *

Nothing changed and everything changed. Sarah slept in Hilda's bed that night, and the night after that. The little cot stayed folded in the corner of the kitchen and the mice played unchecked in the pantry. Conversations that began in front of the fire ended with them lying curled in each others arms in the dark, whispering in the thick silence of the night. As they roamed the moors harvesting herbs they walked with fingers entwined. At black mass they sat next to each other in the pew, arm pressed to arm and thigh pressed against thigh.

Hilda visited the farm where Sarah had grown up and met her parents. They were uncomplicated and taciturn. Sarah’s father told them of the lambing season that had just passed and the mortal boy they had hired to help them. “He’s simple in the mind,” he told them. “He don’t see our magic, but he has a feeling for the animals.” Sarah’s mother watched Hilda intently over the lip of her cup but said nothing.

Afterwards they lay on their backs in a patch of heather on the hillside overlooking the farm and watched clouds scud across the summer sky. “I can’t tell if your parents like me,” Hilda confessed.

“They are struck with awe by you,” Sarah replied.

Hilda giggled. “By me? Why?”

“Because you have been to far away places and learnt things from books. Your hands are soft and you use words they don’t know.”

“Oh,” said Hilda, taken aback that the Prentices might find Hilda Spellman – the least worldly witch in her family or the Church of the Morningstar – so grand. “I didn’t realise.”

“Perhaps they wouldn’t think you so impressive if they discover that you can’t walk into a room without forgetting what you came for,” Sarah told her with a sly grin.

Hilda laughed. “Maybe not.”

They lay in silence for a while, lulled to a doze by the scones and cream Sister Prentice had served them and the hum of insects. Just as Hilda hovered on the brink of sleep Sarah asked her, “Who is Zelda?”

“Zelda?” Hilda asked, the word unfamiliar on her lips after all these years. “Why do you ask that?”

“You say her name in your sleep,” Sarah told her. “Was she your lover?”

Hilda turned onto her side, head pillowed in the folded crook of her arm. “No. She’s my sister.”

“You never speak of her,” Sarah said, turning to face her.

“I—” Hilda found her mind blank. She couldn’t find words to say because when she thought of Zelda she felt distant and fuzzy and out of time. “I can’t,” she finished eventually.

Sarah contemplated her for a moment. “What do you dream of?” she asked at last.

 _Pain. Fear. Loneliness._ She hadn’t known the dream sensations existed within her until they flitted to the surface of her mind. “I don’t know,” Hilda admitted. “I think I dream what she dreams. At least, I hope they are only dreams.”

“It makes you sad,” Sarah observed.

Hilda nodded. The sun still shone and the heather was still soft and fragrant beneath her, but it suddenly felt far away. She was cold and weary, her shoulders knotted with tension. Sarah reached out and touched her cheek.

“We won’t talk of it then,” she said, and kissed Hilda back into the moment.

* * *

Over breakfast one morning Sarah told her “I woke in the night. There was a woman standing over you. She wasn’t really there - a spirit maybe.”

“Did you recognise her?” asked Hilda, cracking the top off her boiled egg. It wasn’t uncommon for the spirits of the women who had died in childbirth to visit the midwife, seeking news of their babe before they passed over.

Sarah shook her head. “I never saw her before.”

“Perhaps she was one of my patients from Cornwall,” Hilda mused, although she struggled to think of any women from that time who could still be so restless.

“I don’t believe so. She wasn’t dressed right for that.”

“How was she dressed?” asked Hilda.

“Like a lady. She had beads sewn on her dress and her hair was done up like you’d need help to do.”

“What did she look like?”

“Pale with a straight nose and brow. Her hair was red. Was it her?” Sarah added when Hilda made no reply.

Hilda replaced the spoon that had been hovering half way to her mouth back on her plate. “Who?”

“Zelda.”

She nodded. “I think so. What was she doing?”

“Just watching. When she saw that I was awake she looked at me a moment. Then she left.”

“Was she hurt?” asked Hilda, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

Sarah shook her head. “No. Just sad. She looked like you do when you think of her.”

After they’d finished their meal Hilda went to the well in the next field to collect water. Normally this was Sarah’s job, but Sarah merely nodded in acknowledgement when Hilda collected the pail from the pantry.

Behind the cover of the granite wall and the gorse hedge she knelt down in the dew-sodden grass and wept. Grief poured forth from a reservoir that she hadn’t realised she held inside her, tumbling and churning like floodwaters until she was sure she would drown. “Zelda!” she cried out into the vast, empty sky above the moors. “Zelda!”

* * *

She felt hollowed out and empty for days afterwards. Sarah didn’t comment on it, but she brought her soothing teas and stroked her hair when they lay in bed at night. Gradually the sensation faded and they resumed their normal lives.

Some months later a wealthy merchant from Whitby gifted them a venetian mirror in thanks for a successful delivery. It was flawless, with leaves and fruit etched into a border of smooth silver glass. Sarah was enchanted: she had never seen a looking glass before. Hilda watched as she preened before it – turning this way and that to see herself, ducking out of view and then popping back to test whether her reflection would do as she did. It was rare that she got to see this childish side of Sarah and she was charmed by it.

She propped the mirror on the chest of drawers in the bedroom so that they could use it to dress with. When she went to get ready for bed that night Sarah was already in her nightgown, hair brushed into soft waves over her shoulders. She gazed into the glass, scrutinising her face.

“Like what you see?” asked Hilda, dropping a peck on her cheek as she passed.

“I look like her.”

“Like who?” asked Hilda, shedding her outer clothing.

“Your sister.”

Hilda straightened up, gazed at the reflection in the mirror. “I suppose you do a little,” she allowed. “You have the same colouring, and something similar in the shape of the cheekbones perhaps.” When Sarah didn’t reply she added, “But only at first glance. You’re nothing like Zelda – at least nothing like she used to be.”

“Do you wish I was?”

Hilda thought, because it was a serious question and it deserved a serious answer. “No. I love you as you are.”

Sarah met Hilda’s gaze in the mirror. Gold glittered in her eyes. “Or perhaps you love me because I’m here.”

Hilda shook her head in an effort to clear her mind. it was late and she hadn’t been prepared for this turn of conversation. “I don’t understand. Of course you’re here.”

“I’m here, and she is not,” Sarah explained. “If you cannot have her, you can have me instead.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hilda scoffed. “Zelda’s my _sister_ – what I feel for you is completely different. You are honest, and direct, and witty, and so, _so_ clever. _That_ is why I love you.”

She tried to press another kiss to Sarah’s cheek but she ducked out of the way. “And yet I look like her,” she persisted. “She who haunts you. Tell me honestly: if you could choose between an hour with me and an hour with her, who would you choose?”

She knew even as she struggled to form a response that something was about to break that couldn’t be mended again. Tears pricked in her eyes. “You can’t ask me that – it’s not fair. I haven’t seen her in nearly a century. Of course I want to see her – just for an hour. But it is you who I want to be with tomorrow and next week and next year – it’s you I’m with _now_.”

“I am the steel knife that you use because you cannot have a silver one.”

How odd it was, thought Hilda, that it was she who was weeping like a babe while Sarah seemed so calm. “No,” she insisted, shaking her head. “You don’t understand.”

“I think that I finally understand for the first time since I have known you. How stupid I was to think that a witch like you ever want someone like me.”

Hilda sank onto the bed, her legs no longer steady enough to hold her. “Sarah, you’re being foolish. You are brilliant – remarkable. Of course I want you.”

Sarah reached for her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. “You don’t know what you want,” she told her.

She left, closing the bedroom door behind her. Hilda looked at her blotchy, tear-stained reflection in the looking glass. Anger coursed through her at the cursed object. “Argh!” she cried as emotion surged up into her throat. Magic fizzed and tumbled out of her mouth and the mirror shattered.

* * *

Sarah slept in the cot by the range that evening. In the morning they treated each other warily, like strangers who had just been introduced. The easiness that had existed between them had vanished. They became midwife and apprentice again – formal and boundaried. Except Sarah was no mere apprentice anymore. Hilda was there to do little more than share the workload – she had nothing left to teach her.

When news came from Edward that her father was dying, Hilda decided that it was time to go home – if the place she had lived for a mere quarter of her lifespan could still be counted as home. Sarah nodded when Hilda told her. She didn’t seem surprised. Hilda rather suspected that she had seen it coming.

“I did love you,” she told her as they said their goodbyes. “I still do, but-”

“It’s not like before,” Sarah finished when Hilda struggled to find the words.

“No,” agreed Hilda.

“You’re a good woman,” Sarah told her, pressing a chaste kiss onto her cheek.

“And you are one of the most talented, strong, _funny_ witches I have ever met,” Hilda told her in return. She wished she could communicate all that was unique and special about Sarah - all the words that she hadn’t been able to articulate when it really mattered.

They embraced like a teacher and student who had become friends. “You must find your sister,” Sarah whispered while they stood in each other’s arms for the last time. “You will never be free until you do.”

And then they pulled apart and Sarah raised her hand to her temple. “Well met Sister.”

“Well met,” Hilda replied.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hilda returns to Greendale to care for her dying father and understands something for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is not going exactly as I expected. I keep going to write 'a few transition paragraphs' and ending up with additional chapters that I hadn't imagined or plotted. Hilda is full of surprises and I'm loving it, but please note the change in rating and new tags.

She mourned for Sarah. However imperfect it had been, Hilda’s love for her had been deep. The pain was most acute in the small things: reaching out at night to find herself alone in the bed, catching herself a dozen times each day thinking _Sarah would like that, Sarah will find this amusing, I must tell Sarah later_. Then the pang upon remembering that she no longer shared her life with Sarah. And it was her fault – because she had not loved Sarah as she had deserved.

The wound was tender and fresh, and it did not dispose her well to tending to her Father. His death was rather like one of his sermons – long and circuitous. He lingered for weeks, issuing commands from his deathbed. He wanted tea, silence, company, darkness, daylight – a constant stream of requirements that Hilda suspected were as much to distract him from the thought of his coming end as anything else. Hilda had seen a lot of death in the course of her profession. In her experience, women walked side by with death over the course of their lives – tending the sick, laying out bodies, disposing of possessions. Men, however – even High Priests – remined removed from its practicalities. When death came to them he was a fearsome stranger.

She tried to remind herself of this when he rang for her in the middle of the night or shouted at her for not preparing his food exactly as he liked it: _he’s being difficult because he’s scared_. It was the first time in her life that she had been the subject of her father’s anger. He possessed, she discovered, an uncanny ability to detect the weakest and most vulnerable parts of her psyche and prey on them mercilessly

_You have never been talented, but what purpose do you serve if you are not even able to be useful?_

_At least when you were a child you were pretty – age has not been kind to you, has it daughter?_

He seemed to sense the grief on her, delighted in pressing the fresh bruise of it.

_You reek of self-pity, Hildegard. Perhaps that is why your lover deserted you._

_Love is a mortal emotion. You must give thanks to the Dark Lord for ridding you of it._

_Is this what it had been like for Zelda?_ she wondered as she stood weeping on the porch one afternoon, caught between the urge to curl in a ball and to set fire to something. How did she survive it, year after year – the constant probing, slicing, diminution? _Had_ she withstood it, or had he whittled away at the bright, brilliant witch Zelda might have become, amputating and cauterising her young soul?

She brought him scrambled eggs, milky puddings and tea laced with foxglove. She read to him from his favourite passages of the Satanic Bible: tales of domination and vengeance. Breath rattled in his chest and she lifted his skeletal frame to bolster him with pillows. Resentment lodged itself low in her belly. Each night she cleansed herself, attempting to remove the dark shadow before it took hold. Each night the tendrils clung a little more tightly to her soul.

Edward was as he had always been – kindly in a distant way. He seemed to understand that she was unhappy and that their father was difficult, but offered little beyond sympathetic glances and the occasional hand on her shoulder by way of support. He was busy – newly appointed director of the Academy, determined to realise their father’s vision of making it an institution to rival the best in Europe. The position of High Priest would become available on their Father’s death and Edward was already preparing for the nomination process, courting favour with those he hoped would support him over his sometime mentor Faustus Blackwood. His mind was occupied with thoughts of what would happen next. The actual facts of their father’s dying didn’t seem to concern him greatly.

She had wondered how it would feel going back to Greendale after all this time. So much had changed: older coven members had died and young ones who had not even been born when she left now held prominent positions. Greendale itself had grown from a rural mining community to a prosperous railway town. Even the house they grew up in was gone, replaced with a more foreboding timber structure on the same site. The cemetery had expanded to accommodate more departed members of the coven, swallowing the herb garden Hilda had planted as a young woman years before.

It didn’t feel familiar, and yet it did. When she sat in the front row at black mass, watching Edward intone prayers over the chalice, she remembered watching her father do the same as a child. She heard echoes of her mother’s singing as she made tea in the cracked old pot that had stood in her parents’ kitchen since before she was born. As she walked through the woods she caught glimpses of little red haired girl running through the trees out of the corner of her eye – always happy, always laughing. The past was everywhere and she was found it a comfort. It was soft where her Father was sharp and jagged.

* * *

“It won’t be long now,” Hilda told him one day. He slept longer and longer these days, and was not always present during those times when he was awake.

“Would you like us to try to summon Zelda?” It was a thought that had pre-occupied her for weeks. The magic required to summon an unwilling person from an unknown location was powerful: dangerous both to she being summoned and the spell caster. Hilda doubted she was capable of it, but Edward might be. She knew the importance of resolution at the end of life and did not like to deny either of them the opportunity.

“Does she finally have something to say to me?” Father asked, his eyes unfocused.

“I don’t know,” Hilda told him, stepping closer to the bed so that he could see her more clearly. “But perhaps you have something to say to her?

“There is no point wasting words on that girl. She is incapable of learning.”

“She’s not a girl any more Father,” she reminded him. “She’s a woman. Don’t you want to see what she’s become?”

He shook his head once, his neck creaking with the effort. “It is you who cling to her, not I. Both my daughters are a disappointment to me. You lack talent and any true inclination towards the Path of Night. She had potential but she was unstable, dangerous – unwilling to submit. As I go to meet the Dark Lord I count the two of you as my greatest failures. Praise Satan that your brothers, at least, have turned into fine men.”

She felt the words as a slap. Her cheek burned and tears stung her eyes. “If _they’re_ such fine men then where are they? I don’t see _them_ waiting to empty your bedpan. Or staying up into the night reading to you when you’re too _afraid_ to be left with your own thoughts.”

“Doing the Dark Lord’s work,” he replied coolly, unmoved by her outburst. His expression told her that he thought her hysterical and irrational. “They are not crippled by sentiment.”

“And my sister, was she crippled by sentiment? Is that why you drove her out?” demanded Hilda, not caring that her voice rose to a shout and her hands trembled.

“No,” he replied. “She was like a demoness. She could have destroyed us all.”

“She was a _girl_ ,” Hilda told him. “A beautiful, clever girl. And you bullied her because you knew she was capable of being more than you would ever be.”

He laughed: a mirthless, breathy cackle. “If you had any sense you would curse her. She is destroying you and you don’t even see it.”

She couldn’t stand to look at him any longer. She seized the tray from the nightstand and left the room, tugging the door closed with a sharp slam behind her. The rattle of his breathing was audible even through the wood.

Her legs shook as she walked downstairs. In the kitchen she sunk down into one of the chairs, gripping the solid surface to ground herself. She felt the past shifting and morphing in her mind, pieces that had never made sense before falling into place. She saw for the first time how malign his influence over their childhood had been. He had sought to belittle, separate and control. The web had closed more tightly around Zelda because she had fought and resisted where Hilda had sweetly, trustingly acquiesced. His influence had been so insidious, his control so absolute, that she had not fully understood it before. He had poisoned them both: Hilda with timidity; Zelda with self-hatred.

Anger coursed through her, fizzing and buzzing and shocking. She pictured them as the little girls they had been: trusting and sweet, with plaited hair and white pinafores. They had been totally dependent on him to shape their view of the world, and the world he had built for them had been a cruel one. She thought of all the times when he had told her that she lacked the intellect for magical studies, and all the nights when she had cradled a wordless Zelda to sleep while blood crusted on the back of her night gown.

She wanted to go back upstairs and shout at him: _We were children! How could you? You were supposed to protect us._ But what would be the point? He felt no remorse – if anything, he was probably proud. Everything he had done, he had done in Satan’s name. 

In her mind, Hilda knelt and embraced the two girls before her. _I will avenge you_ , she promised. _You need never fear him again_.

* * *

The store cupboard was not as well stocked as she would like – her father and brother obviously set little stock in maintaining a wide supply of herbs. There was enough for her purposes though: the potion she was brewing did not require subtlety. She found something that would do the job – stored unused for so long that it was labelled in her own hand – and spooned it into a teapot. She added honey, camomile and liquorice to mask the bitterness.

She laid the tea tray out carefully with a white cloth, delicate porcelain cup and a sprig of dried lavender. The little girls stood beside her, hand in hand, watching the ritual solemnly. "You two go out and play," she told them when she was ready. "This isn't for you to see."

She climbed the stairs slowly, careful not to spill anything.

“Come to apologise, have you daughter?” her father asked as she nudged open the door to his bedroom.

Hilda set the tea tray on the nightstand. “I’ve come to bring you some tea.”

She helped him to sit up against the pillows and moved the cup towards his lips.

“Ah,” he said, his nostrils twitching at the scent carried on the steam. “Finally developed some backbone, have you Hildegard?”

She jolted in surprise. Who knew the old bastard still had such a good sense of smell, when the rest of his body was barely functioning. His lips curled into a smile – she couldn’t tell whether it was vicious or proud. “Perhaps there’s hope for you yet.”

She hesitated, unsure how to proceed. He wrapped an impatient hand around her wrist, tugging the cup to his lips and sucking greedily.

The poison’s effects were quick acting but painful. He held her gaze as he writhed and convulsed, gasping and groaning. His hands twisted into claws and the whites of his eyes gaped like those of a horse under the whip. The nightstand crashed over, crockery and potion bottles smashing on the floorboards. His spine spasmed, causing his entire body to tense and arch up off the bed.

Hilda found herself holding her breath, waiting for him to let go. Still he held her gaze. Triumph flashed across his eyes, then the air left his lungs in one final, terrible gasp and his body collapsed back down into the pillows.

Foam bubbled up out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. She wiped it away with a rag. His eyes were still open, staring at the ceiling. She removed the pillows from behind his head, beginning the process of laying out the body.

“May you burn in hellfire,” she whispered as she lowered his head to the mattress.

The scent of sulphur curled through the air of the sick room. For the briefest of moments she felt a flash of heat on her back. “Praise Satan,” she added as an afterthought.

* * *

The funeral was a set piece of posturing. Hilda watched as warlocks vied to recount tales of how close they had been to the great Cornelius Spellman, courting status by association. Several witches wept conspicuously, implying an intimacy with her father that she knew him to be incapable of. Hilda itched to climb up onto the desecrated altar and denounce their hypocrisy. She wanted to shout for all the world to hear that he had been a cruel, manipulative man whose power was dependent on subjugating others. But she didn’t trust them not to celebrate this news - he had, after all, moulded the Church of Night in his image. So she bit her lip and smiled, and allowed them to mistake her silence for grief.

“Will you stay on?” Edward asked her that evening as they sat watching the fire. “The coven could use a skilled midwife.”

“No,” she replied. “I intend to return to Europe. I want to find Zelda.”

He laid his hand on hers, pity glinting in his eyes. “Zelda doesn’t wish to be found, sister.”

“She does,” Hilda insisted. “She just doesn’t know yet how lost she is.”

Edward patted her hand, then released it. “When you are ready, you will have a home here.”

“And Zelda?” she pressed.

“I would like nothing more than for Zelda to consider this her home. It is a long time since I have seen her, and our family grows very small.” There was sadness in his voice, and she gave thanks that there was still softness in his heart.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hilda begins to investigate her sister's movements in earnest.

It was the end of the 1860s when she started to look for Zelda. She returned to London, staying with Charles and using his connections to find warlocks and witches who had known Zelda in France. Kings and aristocrats found it highly convenient to have warlocks and witches in their inner circles: who better to help them divine the future, curse their enemies and help them bear healthy male heirs. But just as the royal dynasties were close knit – tied together by generations of intermarriage and political alliances – so were the covens that associated with them. Once she had found one person who had known Zelda at Versailles, she had her start.

He was an old warlock, shrivelled and dusty. He talked of Versailles darkly. “It was a Satan cursed place at that time – ripe for destruction. It’s not surprising that it all ended in blood, only that it took so long to do so.”

“And what of my sister?” Hilda pressed him.

“She was talented,” he recalled. “Extremely beautiful. Seductive. I’m sure some of the women would have slipped a knife between her ribs if she were not such a good midwife. And of course it helped that she had the Queen’s protection – lifted a rather troublesome hex for her, I believe.”

“What became of her?”

“I understand that when it became clear that the monarchy would not last she was able to flee the country and received the patronage of the Queen’s sister Marie Carolina – the Queen of Naples. ”

Gradually she began to unpick the puzzle. When Naples fell to republicans at the turn of century Zelda had followed Marie Carolina into exile in Vienna and then stayed on there. When the Holy Roman Empire dissolved after the Battle of Austerlitz she remained in Austria for several decades, at the court of Francis I. Then she disappeared without a trace – Hilda never found out where she was for much of the 1820s – before re-emerging in the Ottoman court in the 1830s. Following the Crimean War she had moved to Egypt, working as a curse-breaker for Victorian gentlemen archaeologists.

Hilda couldn’t help but notice that Zelda’s timing was either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Her movements seemed to follow some of the most dramatic upheavals in history – wars, revolutions and reformations. Wherever chaos was, Zelda would show up.

She met people who had known Zelda. She heard stories of the strength of Zelda’s powers and the extraordinary breadth of her magical learning. It seemed that as she travelled, Zelda had sought out the most powerful witches and warlocks in the area, studying their rites and spellcraft. She heard stories of Zelda’s skill as a midwife – it was rumoured that she had never lost a child. She heard stories of Zelda’s voracious appetite for beauty: beautiful clothes, beautiful surroundings, beautiful people. Zelda grew in her mind to an almost mythical creature: potent, gifted and alluring. She began to wonder whether Zelda had left her behind so thoroughly because Hilda was so dull: how could such an exotic creature have any need for her?

Her efforts were slowed during the last few decades of the nineteenth century by birth of Charles’ son, Ambrose, followed swiftly by Charles’ untimely death – assassinated by a rival High Priest. Hilda stayed in London for a decade or so, helping Charles’ widow Henrietta raise the boy. Henrietta did not take Charles’ death well and eventually her parents took custody of the teenage Ambrose. Henrietta responded by drowning herself in the Thames, and Hilda took this as her cue to resume her search in earnest.

By the 1900s she was getting closer. Rather than decades behind, she was a few years or sometimes even a mere few months behind Zelda. At the end of 1916 she traced Zelda to Russia. There was another war raging in Europe, which made travel from England more difficult. However she secured passage to Archangel on a Norwegian freighter and from there travelled by train to Moscow. A member of Hilda’s former coven in Cornwall was able to put her in touch with a herbalist there, a homely young witch by the name of Serpahima who ran an apothecary. She agreed to offer Hilda a place to stay, and to act as a guide and interpreter, in exchange for a selection of herbs which were not easily obtainable in Russia.

Over borscht and schnapps the evening she arrived, Hilda showed Seraphima the address she’d managed to obtain.

“Your sister lives here?” she asked in surprise, examining the slip of paper.

“Yes. What’s odd about that?”

“Not odd, but is very wealthy area. Many powerful people is living here. She must be very rich to afford it. Or having very rich friends.”

Neither would surprise Hilda, but it raised even more questions for her about what Zelda was doing in Moscow and who she was mixing with. “Can you take me there tomorrow?” she asked.

Seraphima nodded. “In this neighbourhood privacy is important. We will be needing bribes or charms to get information.”

“Oh don’t you worry,” Hilda reassured her. “Charms are my speciality.”

* * *

She was impatient to get started, so the next morning they bundled themselves up in layers of coats, scarves and mufflers straight after breakfast and headed out. Even without knowing the city, Hilda could sense their surroundings becoming more refined as they walked. Finally Seraphima halted outside a seven storey building on a tree lined avenue as wide as an estuary. The building was constructed on a different scale to the buildings Hilda was used to – the windows were ten feet high and five feet across. It was surrounded by cast iron railings painted glossy black. The ground floor was set a few feet above street level so that nosey passers-by could not see in.

“This is it,” Seraphima told her. “Your sister’s apartment is on second floor.”

Hilda glanced up at the window she was pointing to. From this angle the window panes were opaque, reflecting the grey winter sky back at her. “Let’s go,” she said.

They went up to the second floor. She tried first the bell, then the knocker, then knocking on the solid oak door and calling her sister’s name, but there was no answer. She sensed that the apartment beyond was empty – the residual traces of Zelda’s magic were barely detectable. There was a hex on the door. She was not willing to risk whatever spiteful trap Zelda has prepared for intruders – they would need a key. She told Seraphima as much.

The witch nodded. “Let us speak to the superintendent then.”

They found him in an office just off the grand marble-lined entrance hall. He wore a red velvet and brocade uniform, but it didn’t suit him. The body within the lovely clothes was shrunken and pockmarked, and his hair hung in greasy curtains around his cheeks. He eyed them with suspicion when he answered the door to them. Seraphima addressed him in Russian and she saw the reluctance in his body language as he answered her first question.

Seraphima glanced at her and Hilda muttered a charm, pressing trust and co-operation against the wall of distrust that surrounded him. Seraphima posed another question and this time he answered in some detail. They spoke for several more minutes. Then the man unlocked a safe embedded in his office wall, searched through a metal box and handed Seraphima a key attached to a luggage label.

Seraphima thanked him and led Hilda out of the office. “He says your sister left in middle of night two days ago,” she told Hilda as they returned to the second floor. “She was wearing travelling clothes and carrying case. He does not think she will return.”

* * *

Hilda unlocked the door to the apartment, wary of any further booby traps that Zelda may have laid, however it seemed Zelda had no interest in harming those who may try to enter with a key. Seraphima followed her inside and stood gazing at the ceiling with wonder. Hilda could understand why – the entrance hall alone was practically the same size as Seraphima’s small apartment. A huge crystal chandelier hung over a glossy walnut table topped with an elaborate flower arrangement. The flowers were wilting, petals and pollen littering the table’s smooth surface, but the effect was still impressive. Hilda found herself wondering how much effort must be required to keep it all clean.

Seraphima loitered in the drawing room, running her fingers over the spines of the books in the bookcase, while Hilda explored. She walked from room to room, stepping in and out of pools of milky winter light cast by the enormous windows. It was clear that Zelda had left in a hurry. A half-drunk glass of wine stood on the drawing room table, next to an unstopped decanter. Scraps of charred paper and fabric were visible among the ashes in the hearth, and empty potion bottles stood upended in the scullery sink.

In the dressing room Zelda’s dresses still hung in one of the wardrobes. Hilda ran her fingers over the gowns: silk, velvet and chiffon in luminous shades of turquoise, emerald, sapphire, garnet, gold and lustrous black. Some were embroidered with jewels and gold thread, others embellished with panels of fine lace. In the next cupboard fur coats, hats and muffs were laid out, and in the next shelves of crisp white linens. Hilda ached to see her sister in such beautiful clothes, but the fact that they had been left behind so casually made fear claw at her stomach. What would cause Zelda to leave so suddenly and travel so light?

The last room she entered was her sister’s bedroom. It was an oddly austere space, given the elegant furnishings of the rest of the apartment. There was no carpet on the unvarnished floorboards and no ornament on the walls. The bed was dressed in rough horsehair blankets, with no decorative counterpane. She searched the nightstand and the dressing table, but aside from a few discarded cosmetics they were empty.

A crumpled nightgown lay abandoned on the edge of the bed. Hilda lifted it to her nose and found that a scent still lingered there – jasmine, rose and sandalwood, and beneath it that indescribable essence that was Zelda. Tears welled up in her eyes as memories came rushing back on the scent – the two of them curling up in bed together on cold evenings, Zelda captivating her with stories of the sprites and dryads that lived in the woods. She tried not to think too often of those precious years they’d shared together as girls, before Zelda had hardened and then run.

She climbed into the bed, nestling into Zelda’s abandoned nest of horsehair blankets. She wanted to cry, but she worried that if she started she might never stop. She had come all this way only to miss Zelda by a matter of days. Lying here, where Zelda’s body must have lain two or three nights before, she was the closest she had been to her sister in a hundred and fifty years. And she knew nothing: anything that might have told her who Zelda had associated with or where she had gone had either been burnt or taken with her.

She wasn’t sure how long she had lain there before Seraphima sought her out. “She is not coming back here,” she told Hilda.

“I agree,” Hilda said, climbing out of the bed. She felt drained and achy. “We must speak to the superintendent again, see if we can find out anything useful.” She took the nightgown with her, folded into her coat pocket, and slept with it on her pillow for weeks until the scent wore away.

* * *

With the application of the right charm, the superintendent was quite talkative. Hilda watched as the conversation moved back and forth between him and Seraphima. The superintendent seemed to be describing things that made him angry. Several times he banged his fist against the arm of his chair, and once he spat extravagantly on the floor. Seraphima’s forehead was creased in worry.

“What?” Hilda asked eventually, when she could wait no longer to find out what was being discussed. “Does he know something?”

“He thinks your sister was acquaintance of Rasputin,” Seraphima told her, as though this should be news of great significance.

“I’m sorry,” said Hilda, shaking her head, “I don’t know who that is.”

“A warlock – he was a High Priest, but he and his followers have gone their own way. Many is hating him because he has much influence with Tsar. He is—” she seemed to be struggling to find the right words. “He is dangerous man,” she finished, with a shrug that implied there was far more to the story than that.”

“Where does Rasputin live?” she asked, sensing an opportunity. “Do you think we can talk to him?”

Serpahima shook her head, her expression grave. “His body was pulled from the river this morning.”

“Oh.” Hilda reached out to steady herself on the back of a chair.

“They say he was killed two days ago,” Serpahima added. “The same night your sister fled.”

Hilda clenched the chair until her knuckles were white. Her chest felt tight and heavy. _Oh Zelda, what have you got yourself involved with?_

“Do you want to know anything more?”

Hilda scrunched her eyes closed, running through what little they had gleaned from their trip. “Yes!” she said. “Ask him who cooked and cleaned for her.”

“You want to know about the housekeeping?” Seraphima asked. Then comprehension bloomed across her face. “Ah yes, I see. Very clever.”

Seraphima obtained the address of two sisters who came each day to clean and cook for Zelda. “They have not been since she left,” she told Hilda as they exited the apartment building and set off towards the district where the housekeeps lived.

“Perhaps Zelda let them know that she no longer needed them,” Hilda suggested. It was the first indication they'd found that Zelda may have had time to order her affairs before she left.

She hung onto that hope like a talisman right up until the moment that they discovered the sisters lying in a pool of their own blood, their throats split from ear to ear. Among the arterial spray, sigils had been drawn on the walls in blood.

Seraphima stared at the scene in horror, then ran outside to vomit her breakfast into a snow bank. Hilda forced herself to ignore the sisters’ bodies as she copied the sigils into her pocketbook. Then she tugged the door closed and went to comfort her guide.

* * *

That night, after Seraphima had retired to bed, she tried a summoning spell. It failed, but in failing she discovered something. The spell didn’t reach out and find nothing, as it would have if Zelda were dead. Rather it reached out and found something, only for the connection to be promptly severed from the other end. The spell snapped back at her so forcefully that Hilda had been momentarily stunned. At least, she consoled herself as she rubbed her pounding head, it meant Zelda was still alive.

She made arrangements for Zelda's belongings to be shipped back to England, then returned to the cottage in Devon that she had taken after Charles died. Back in England she made enquiries about Rasputin and his circle, sought out people who might have known him in Russia, and researched the sigils, but her efforts were fruitless. It was her first major setback, and for a time she considered abandoning her search entirely. It seemed that not only did Zelda really not want to be found, but that she moved in pretty dangerous circles these days.

Three months after her return from Russia a parcel arrived for her in the post. It was the first time in decades that she had seen Zelda’s handwriting. The style had altered a little over time, but she would have recognised the firm line of the letters and the dramatic loop of the ‘S’ of Spellman anywhere. Inside a little wooden create packed with straw rested a disc of jade carved with a relief of a spider on a web. The amulet hummed – practically vibrated with the force of the protection spell that Zelda had cast upon it. Hilda had clutched the little disc in her hand and wept, because here at last was proof that Zelda still cared for her.

Later, when she had no tears left, she had examined the packaging more closely. As well as the address in English, there was a label written in what she thought might be Chinese and a bilingual stamp bearing the name of a shipping company: Choi Li Shipping Company of Peking. It was enough to start her on her next phase of investigation.

She discovered that when Zelda left Moscow she had travelled east by train to Chita, where she had boarded another train bound for Peking. She had apparently remained there for several weeks – long enough to commission a jade carving and send it to Hilda – before leaving for Tibet. There the trail went completely cold. Hilda’s contacts advised her against even trying to find her. The country was too vast, too empty and too different for a foreign woman travelling alone to be able to penetrate. This thought gave her no comfort. At night as she lay in bed she clutched the jade amulet in her hand and muttered protection spells until she fell asleep. _Keep my sister safe_.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hilda tracks Zelda to 1920s Hong Kong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I opened up my WIP file to start work on this chapter, it was labelled 'Chapter 3' (of 4) - because when I originally planned this story it was going to be 4 chapters and about 7,500 words. That's how wildly out of hand this story has got! But it has meant that Hilda's had a chance to roam the Yorkshire moors with a GF, torture her father to death and have dinner with Virgina Woolf, so I'm kind of at peace with it now. Enjoy!

It was five years before she got another lead on Zelda’s location. She was at a dinner party hosted by Leonard and Ginny Woolf – a get together for refugees from Rupert Brooks’ neo-pagan crowd. They were none of them witches – merely mortals who liked to dabble in folk magic and pastoral traditions. But Hilda appreciated their attention to nature and the seasons, and their gentle, idealistic outlook. Plus they knew how to throw a good party.

After the meal was over, when they sat trading stories over half drunk cups of coffee and crumbling fingerfuls of cheese, one of the guests recounted a tale of a red-haired witch he’d encountered in Hong Kong. “Quite the most singular creature I’ve ever met,” he remarked over port. “Somewhere between a queen and a she-devil. One forgets that not all Satanic witches are as sweet as you, dear Hilda. She was an exquisite, terrible thing.”

When she pressed him, Archie Morton - a dull man whose only noteworthy characteristic was that he and Leonard had once shared a billet in the Ceylon civil service - confirmed that the witch had told him that Zelda was her name. She had drunk him under the table before he had been able to find out much about her, but he was able to recall the she had told him that she lived in Hong Kong, and that she had been greeted as a regular at the bar of the Repulse Bay Hotel. “She charged a magnum of champagne and two dozen oysters to my room,” he said ruefully. “It’s a damn shame that I don’t at least have some jolly memories to show for it.”

Hilda was on an ocean liner to Hong Kong before the week was out. The six week crossing passed interminably slowly. She spent much of it in her cabin. She knitted a cardigan, a blanket and two pairs of socks so that her restless hands had something to do. As they travelled, the weather grew hotter and more humid until the days passed in a damp haze of heat and sweat, and she was forced to take turns around the deck to get some relief from the discomfort. If sparks of electricity happened to crackle in the air as she passed, who was to say that it wasn’t a storm brewing? Hell knew, she would welcome a storm to help clear the restlessness that crawled beneath her skin.

She’d never been much of one for private prayer, but she prayed now. _Please let me find her this time. Please let her be safe. I don’t care if she doesn’t want to see me, please just let me catch one glimpse of her alive and well_. She prayed to Lilith too, muttering remembered prayers from her childhood as she knitted, her needles setting the rhythm. _Hail Lilith, full of disgrace_ …

She was met at the dock by High Priest Henry Ho, a Eurasian warlock who she had first met a century before when he had been a seminarian in the Church of the Morningstar. “Hilda,” he said, bowing at the waist in greeting. “It is good to see you again after all this time.”

“You too, Henry,” she said, mirroring his bow.

“You must be very tired after your voyage.”

“No, I’m not tired. Please don’t even _think_ about suggesting that I might like to rest, because I’ve just spent six weeks in a tiny cramped cabin _resting_. I’m ready to get started.”

Henry eyed her in wide eyed surprise, and she realised that her response to a polite enquiry had been somewhat disproportionate. “I apologise,” she said. “I found the voyage rather…frustrating. But I did make you some socks.”

He smiled. “I am not offended. You have travelled a long way. And I do have some news for you. Let us go to my home, and while we travel I will tell you.”

He had brought a motorcar. The driver loaded Hilda’s luggage into the boot while Henry helped her into the back seat.

“You said you had news,” Hilda said, as soon as the car was moving.

“I think I have met your sister.”

“What!?” Shock sparked through her. Of all the things he could have said, she hadn’t been expecting this. “Where? When? Where is she?”

He held up a hand to temper her enthusiasm. “It was almost a year ago. She came to my church a few times but I do not think that the – the _style_ of worship was to her taste. I have not seen her since.”

“But what did she say? How did you know it was her?”

“She told me that she had just arrived from Tibet. She spoke in Cantonese, but she said that her family was originally from England, and that she had been travelling for a long time. She had orange hair, and a long forehead like yours.”

Hilda nodded, eagerly. “That’s her, it must be. Do you know where she’s staying? What she’s _doing_ in Hong Kong?”

Henry shook his head. “No, but I have asked some members of my coven to make enquiries. She is very distinctive – they may be able to find out more.”

Hilda examined the tense set of Henry’s body and the way he held his hands in his lap. “Is there something else?” she prompted. “Something that you’re not telling me?”

He glanced out of the window, gathering his thoughts. When he turned his gaze back to her his words were slow and carefully chosen. “When I said that the style of worship was not to her taste…she was very extreme in her devotion to the Dark Lord. Which is admirable, of course, but—”

“But what? Just spit it out Henry, you won’t offend me.”

“But some of her practices were very old fashioned. I—I cannot break the seal of the confessional, Hilda. But I do believe that she was very troubled. Even when I granted her absolution, she could not accept forgiveness.”

Hilda pressed her eyes closed. Suddenly, in the back of this metal box in the middle of a dusty, humid city her head was swimming. What did he mean? She understood his words, and yet she didn’t understand the significance that Henry was trying to communicate. Only that his encounter with Zelda had left him concerned and…unsettled? She pressed her fingers against her forehead, trying to order her thoughts.

“I am sorry,” Henry said.

“No, you haven’t upset me. It’s just – perhaps I _am_ tired after all. I’m not used to this heat.”

“It is very draining,” he agreed readily. “We are nearly there now.”

Henry’s house was beautiful – a stately bungalow on the hillside overlooking the harbour, surrounded by a walled garden. Hilda was greeted by his wife, Pearl, and their two sweet young children, who she would later regret doing little more than acknowledging during her stay. She showered and accepted the offer of tea taken in the cool shade of the verandah.

She tried to make conversation – to answer Henry’s questions about what had changed in London since he had visited last, and accept his condolences over Charles’ death, and to make polite enquiries about their coven and about life in Hong Kong. But when Pearl suggested that she might like to rest for a while, she gratefully accepted.

She lay in the darkened bedroom, examining the slanted bars of light that the shutters threw onto the ceiling. She was so close this time, she could feel it. It was as though Zelda had just stepped into the next room – the air was still turbulent from her presence. Yet she had never seemed so far away. This troubled witch who had so discomforted Henry could not be her Zelda – could she? She started to fear that she may have left it too late. What if she did not recognise the person that she found?

* * *

Henry and Pearl were generous with their time. Henry took Hilda to visit his church – a modern building in Wan Chai, sandwiched between a warehouse and a bank. It lacked the gothic references of desecrated churches back west – owed more to the clean lines of Buddhist temples and Teutonic puritanism than the renaissance. Was that reflected in the theology too, she wondered? Was that what Henry had meant by the style of worship not being to Zelda’s taste? She could understand why a focus on individual piety as a path to salvation, rather than sacramentalism and obedience to an infallible institution, might not appeal to a child formed in the Church of Night.

She, Pearl and the children took the car to Repulse Bay for the day. While the children waded in the warm turquoise sea, Hilda visited the hotel bar where Archie Morton had met Zelda three months before.

The barman knew Zelda, but he hadn’t seen her in in several weeks. “Does she have any friends? Anyone she meets here?” Hilda asked him.

He shook his head. “I do not think she comes here for company. I think she comes to forget.” But what she might want to forget, he could not say.

She drank gin and tonic at a table by the window. Every time someone walked through the door her stomach leapt in hope. She could see why Zelda liked the spot. The hotel was situated overlooking the bay, perched on a hillside to catch what little breeze blew off the sea. It had tall ceilings and beautiful vistas and cool marble walls and floor. If she closed her eyes she could forget that she was in a too-hot country miles from home and allow herself to be lulled into a stupor by the sound of the waves breaking on the beach below.

On the fourth day of her visit, she came to breakfast to find a warlock sitting at the table. He stood when she entered the room, and Henry introduced him as Xian – a member of his congregation. “He brings news,” Henry told her.

“Please, tell me,” she said, taking her seat and indicating that Xian and Henry should do the same.

Henry nodded at Xian encouragingly. “There is a witch with orange hair living in Happy Valley, near Jardine’s Lookout,” Xian said, his eyes lowered respectfully.

“It’s in the hills, on the road to Repulse Bay,” Henry added by way of explanation.

“Can you take me there?” asked Hilda, her fingers curling around the edge of the table.

Xian and Henry exchanged glances. “We will go together,” said Henry. “After breakfast. It is very hot today and you will be ill if you do not have anything to eat or drink.”

* * *

Happy Valley was another hillside community, more densely populated than the Peak where Henry and his family lived, but still lush and quiet compared to the city. Xian stopped outside a small bungalow on a cul du sac, surrounded by a low white wall and a dense border of cassia bushes that screened the house from the road.

“This is where she has been living,” he told her.

Hilda was already out of the car, suddenly nervous as she unlatched the gate and walked up the garden path.

“Hilda, wait!” She heard Henry faintly in the background but the words didn’t register. She could feel tendrils of Zelda’s magic curling around the verandah: red and gold and smooth and cool and – smoky? Dark? What was that under-note?

She climbed the wooden steps up onto the verandah. The green paint had puckered and cracked from the heat. The air felt heavy and oppressive – the breeze from the hillside didn’t seem to penetrate beyond the balustrade. Sweat pooled in the hollow between her collarbones. She stopped, forced herself to take a deep breath in and out.

“Hilda!” called Henry. She turned to see him standing at the base of the stairs, his hand hovering above the banister. Xian waited by the car, his face pale and anxious. “Something is wrong here, don’t you feel it?”

So it wasn’t just anticipation souring in her stomach - they felt it too. “Yes,” she said. And it gave her the courage to walk up to the front door and knock.

The house absorbed the sound like a cavern. She tried again. Nothing moved on the other side of the door. She closed her eyes and tried to feel what was on the other side, reaching out for something alive. There was nothing. It wasn’t that the house was empty – it was more like reaching into a void. Energy dissipated as soon as it left her. She’d never felt anything like it.

“Zelda!” she cried out, spooked by the sensation. “Zelda!” She wasn’t knocking politely any more, she was pounding against the door with both fists, the sound of her hammering oddly muted.

“Be careful, Hilda,” said Henry, appearing beside her. He placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. “This place feels cursed.”

Was that what the odd atmosphere that clung to the bungalow was? Her urgency to get inside doubled. She felt out with her magic again, seeking out hexes set to repel intruders, but she couldn’t feel anything. She rattled the handle, testing out the lock. The door was bolted from the other side. She walked down to the side of the house and peered into a window. The room beyond was dark. She tried tapping on the glass. “Zelda, it’s Hilda. _Please_ , for the love of Satan, if you’re inside then answer the door!”

Silence. She stared into the shadow until it seemed to swim and curl before her eyes. It coalesced into a blur of white and brown that leapt up towards the other side of the glass. Hilda yelped and jumped back in shock.

“What’s wrong?” asked Henry, rushing to join her.

“There’s something inside,” said Hilda, her hand pressing her chest as though to try and slow down her pounding heart. “I saw something move – something inhuman.”

A sound came from inside – the frantic, insistent barking of a dog.

Hilda and Henry looked at each other in confusion. Cautiously Hilda stepped back towards the window and peered through the glass. A basset hound stood on his hind legs, paws resting on the window sill.

“Tom!” she called out with relief.

Vinegar Tom yapped in recognition.

“That’s Zelda’s familiar,” she explained to Henry. Then turning back to the window: “Tom, we’re here to help Zelda. Can you let us in?”

He jumped down from the window and ran out of her eyeline. “No wait, Tom, come back! We can help. Oh _bless it_!” she swore in frustration, slapping her palm against the window frame.

The air cracked with a blast of magic so powerful that it would have knocked her off her feet if she hadn’t still been holding onto the wall. “What was that?” she asked Henry, who had been thrown against the balustrade of the verandah.

He righted himself. “Goblin magic, I believe,” he replied, nodding towards the front door.

Hilda turned to look. The door stood open, half off its hinges. Vinegar Tom’s claws clicked against the wooden floor as he walked over to stand in front of her. He barked, urgently, as if to say _Come on, what are you waiting for_?

“Oh Tom,” said Hilda, bending down to scratch him behind the ears. “You’re a little demon.”

Tom accepted the attention, then turned and headed towards the front door. He stopped on the threshold and looked back at her, giving the strong impression that she should follow _immediately_.

Ignoring the warning hand that Henry placed on her arm, Hilda hurried after him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I googled 'Vinegar Tom' to find out what kind of dog he is, and according to Wikipedia "Vinegar Tom is the title of a 1976 play by the British playwright Caryl Churchill. The play examines gender and power relationships through the lens of 17th-century witchcraft trials in England." How did I not know about this before??
> 
> Also, I used to work with a guy from Hong Kong who was called Henry Ho (known to his colleagues as 'the Ho'). He totally owned that name and it truly was a gift, so I stole it. I feel no shame.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Spellman family is reunited

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story continues to be much longer than expected, and may also cross the line into rambling at points. I hope this chapter is worth the wait.

The bungalow was dark and barely furnished. Vinegar Tom led her through a living room that contained only an armchair, a stack of books and a floor lamp. The hallway was bare save for a hat stand from which a single coat hung like a spectre. Her footsteps should have echoed off the bare surfaces but - as her voice had been earlier - the sound was muffled. Her skin tingled with discomfort.

“Where is she, Tom?” Hilda asked, hoping that speaking might dispel the dread that hovered over her shoulders.

Tom led her down the corridor. A strange smell hung in the air – burnt and sweet and chemical.

“Zelda?” she called.

Silence.

Tom nosed open a door at the end of the corridor and disappeared aside. Hilda hovered in the doorway, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room beyond. It was another almost-empty room. A travelling trunk stood under the shuttered window and set into the far wall was another door that perhaps led to a closet. In the centre of the room, atop a sleeping mat, lay Zelda. Her half open eyes stared insensibly ahead. Tom had crawled into the crook of her right arm and lay looking up at Hilda.

“Zelda,” she breathed. The air was thick and oppressive, like the air before a storm.

Zelda gave no indication that she was aware of Hilda’s presence. Her chest rose and fell with slow shallow breaths that grated in her throat. Tom whined and burrowed his snout into the gap between Zelda’s arm and her side. Zelda’s fingers twitched briefly against the dog’s hide – but for all the awareness she showed of her surroundings it might have been an instinctive reaction.

Biting back tears, Hilda knelt down at Zelda’s side. “Zelds?” she asked. She smoothed strands of red hair away from where they clung in damp strands to her forehead. “Zelda,” she repeated, more loudly, “can you hear me sister?”

Henry appeared in the doorway, wand drawn. “Is it her?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, stroking Zelda’s cheek.

Henry came and crouched down on the other side of Zelda, his wand still drawn and his weight poised ready to run at a moment’s notice.

Hilda ran her hands down Zelda’s arms, focusing her magic on detecting what lay within her body. Later, she was surprised that how easily she had slipped into the mode of healer. It helped, somehow, to distance herself on the fact that it was her sister who lay in front of her and to treat her as a patient instead.

She frowned as she moved her hands over the length of Zelda’s body. She’d only ever come across such terrible magic depletion in patients close to death. Zelda did have many of the hallmarks of being close to death: her heartbeat was slow and erratic, and her breath came in occasional, lugubrious gasps. But this didn’t feel the same.

A hose connected to a kind of closed glass vase lay curled in the fingers of Zelda’s left hand. Henry prodded it with his wand. “This may explain why she is so still.”

“What is it?” asked Hilda.

“Opium,” said Henry. His tone was disapproving.

Of course. Hilda was not familiar with opium in this form, but she had used laudanum often enough. It would explain the stupor and Zelda’s terribly laboured breathing. But not the strange disruption she could feel to Zelda’s magical field. It was as though the black void that hung over the house was inside Zelda too – leaching her energy. “We need to get her out of here,” Hilda said decisively. “I need my medical bag and my grimoire.” Although truly she wasn’t sure which she wanted more – access to her healing supplies, or to get Zelda away from this awful place.

Henry looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Hilda. You cannot bring her to my house.”

Hilda looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“My children are there,” he explained. “I cannot risk whatever is wrong with her affecting them.”

Her first response was anger, and disbelief that Henry could be so callous. But when she met his gaze she saw the apologetic look in his eye and realised that he felt he had no choice. However much he wanted to help a friend, his first duty was to his family. If anyone could appreciate that, it was Hilda. “I understand,” she said. “In that case, can you bring them to me?”

“Yes,” he said, looking relieved. “Yes, I will go immediately.”

* * *

While Henry was gone she did her best to make Zelda more comfortable. She raised the blinds in the bedroom and threw open the window, before casting a cleansing spell to dispel negative energy.

The midday sunlight was bright. Hilda was encouraged to see that Zelda still had enough awareness to groan and wince away from the light. “It’s all right love,” Hilda reassured her, half lowering the blinds again so that they cast a shadow across Zelda’s face. In the daylight Hilda could see how ill she looked. She wore a pair of creased linen trousers and a crumpled chemise that revealed a thin body and sickly white skin.

“You stay where you are,” Hilda told her, “I’m just going to fetch a few things. Tom will keep you company.” Vinegar Tom lifted his head briefly, as if nodding in agreement, and then nuzzled Zelda’s shoulder.

Hilda moved through the bungalow, throwing open windows and cleansing each room as she went. The other rooms were no less bleak and depressing than the ones she had already seen. She collected a basin of warm water and towels. From the trunk in Zelda’s room she retrieved a nightdress. Supplies gathered, she returned to Zelda’s side. “Let’s get you cleaned up and into some nice fresh clothes, shall we?” she said.

She stripped Zelda of her sweat-stained garments and patted her down with a damp towel. It pained her to see her sister’s body, once so voluptuous, reduced to skin and bone. It pained her even more to see the pink and white scars that corded her back. Mortification of the flesh was considered an extreme and old-fashioned practice in the Satanic Church. Many covens had abandoned it all together, and in those that hadn’t most chose not to practice it. There were, in Hilda’s view, many more constructive forms of penance than injuring one’s earthly body.

“What on earth have you been doing to yourself, my little dove?” she cooed as she slipped a nightdress over Zelda’s head and lowered her back onto the sleeping mat. “Don’t you worry, we’ll have you right as rain before you know it.” As though she were the older sister and Zelda the younger. She supposed that in the span of a witch’s lifetime, six years was nothing.

The sustained contact allowed her to get a better sense of her sister’s condition. She wasn’t only weakened by exposure to that Satan-forsaken drug. There was something lodged into her magical field like a fish hook. It was a curse. It was not the bungalow that was cursed, but Zelda herself.

* * *

It took days for the drug to leave Zelda’s body. Hilda sat with her as she sweated, vomited, sobbed, raged and slept. At times she hallucinated, speaking to people that Hilda couldn’t see in languages that she didn’t recognise. She gave her potions to lower her fever and help her to sleep. When she was awake, Hilda held water to her lips and spoon fed her egg drop soup. She rubbed salve onto the lattice of scars on her back until they began to fade. She read to her as Zelda hovered restlessly just below the membrane of consciousness. Romance novels only made her more agitated, but the poetry of the dog-eared Satanic Bible she had found in Zelda’s travelling chest seemed to sooth her.

The first time Zelda was lucid was almost a week later. Hilda brought her some soup for diner and Zelda had turned to look at her as she came into the room. Her eyes were clear and focused. Hilda smiled as she knelt down beside her.

“Hello my darling, are you feeling better?”

“You came.” Her voice was hoarse and cracked.

“Oh Zelds, of course I did.” She reached out to stroke the hair back from her forehead.

Zelda caught her hand and held it weakly. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“No such luck, I’m afraid. Despite the merry dance you've led me.” She tried to keep her tone light, but her voice sounded strained in her own ears.

“I thought you would forget me.”

“How could I forget you? You’re my sister.”

Zelda didn’t respond to this. Her gaze skittered away from her face, darting around the room to check shadowy corners and points of entry. Apparently satisfied, she looked back at Hilda. “You're wearing it,” she murmured.

Hilda realised Zelda was looking at the jade amulet, which she had had set into a brooch and wore pinned to her dress. “Yes. I wear it every day.”

“I wanted to keep you safe,” Zelda said, her eyelids starting to droop. “I didn’t want you to be harmed because of me.”

“Here, have some soup before you fall asleep Zelds – just a few mouthfuls to keep your strength up.” She concentrated on helping Zelda into a sitting position and spooning soup into her mouth, because she dared not examine the wound within her that ached at Zelda’s words. Ached at the thought that Zelda did not believe that her absence was its own form of harm. Ached at the harm that her absence had done. To acknowledge it would be too much to bear.

* * *

It was tempting to keep Zelda to herself – to transport her to her cottage in the New Forest, wrap them both up in a bubble and revel in the decades of intimacy that she had been denied. But she knew that the curse that afflicted Zelda was beyond her ability to solve. And that in his own way, Edward had also mourned for Zelda – especially following the death of their father, when he had been left all alone in a house designed for company. Now was the time to bring the Spellman family together again: to do otherwise would have been selfish. So she arranged to take Zelda back to Greendale the following morning, with Henry anchoring the spell in Hong Kong and Edward acting as a beacon in Greendale.

They’d agreed that it was safest for Hilda, Zelda and Vinegar Tom to materialise in the garden – where a few feet of miscalculation would result in a rough landing in a vegetable bed rather than intersection by a wall. As it was, the landing was perfect: they materialised in a clear patch of lawn directly in front of the house. Edward awaited them at the foot of the porch steps, trim in his clerical suit. She realised for the first time that as he aged, he had started to resemble their father.

Zelda stood clutching Vinegar Tom in her arms. She was still weak. Hilda held her steady with a hand under her elbow, and she felt her tense at the sight of him.

“Welcome, sister,” he said. Edward’s eyes flickered uncertainly towards Zelda’s legs. Worried about the relative cold in Greendale, Hilda had dressed Zelda warmly in poplin trousers and a quilted mandarin jacket. The sight of women in trousers was still unusual in Greendale, and he evidently considered it somewhat risqué. 

Zelda opened her mouth to speak but the words dried up in her throat.

“Here we are,” said Hilda encouragingly, squeezing her elbow. “It all looks very different since you were last here, doesn’t it?” This was no exaggeration. The building they stood before hadn't even existed the last time Zelda had been in Greendale.

Zelda nodded. “I wouldn’t have recognised it.” She spoke so quietly that she could barely be heard above the breeze stirring through the forest.

“It is good to see you, Zelda,” said Edward. The words were stiff and formal, as if addressed to a parishioner.

They took a step towards each other, uncertain of the suitable form of greeting. Edward placed a brief kiss on Zelda’s cheek.

Vinegar Tom wriggled out of Zelda’s grip and ran towards the stairs. He looked back at them, indicating that they should follow. Hilda laughed, “I believe someone is telling us that it is time to go inside, out of the cold. Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping, Zelds.”

“I’ll bring the luggage,” Edward told them as Hilda led her into the house.

Hilda had selected a guest bedroom for them to share. It was not the largest or the brightest room, but it had the advantage of being furnished with twin beds. Vinegar Tom hopped up onto the bed furthest from the door. Zelda sat down next to him, slumped with fatigue.

“Why don’t you rest for a while?” Hilda suggested. “I’ll rustle us up a nice cup of tea.”

Zelda didn’t respond except to lie down on top of the comforter and lift an arm to let Tom nestle beside her. Hilda smiled at the sight of them cuddled together. She tugged the door tightly shut behind her, as though by doing so she could fix them securely in place until she returned.

* * *

Edward and Zelda orbited awkwardly at first, not sure what to make of each other. After a few days, Hilda suggested that Edward might like to invite Zelda to join him when he said the Satanic office each morning and evening. The structure seemed to help them both. At first they just recited the prescribed prayers together, but gradually Hilda observed Edward lingering longer - sitting with Zelda awhile after they had finished to enquire after her health, and responding to her questions about the coven and how the Academy had developed under his directorship. One evening she came to call them to dinner and found Edward reading to Zelda from his draft sermon for the following Sunday’s black mass. They seemed to be on more certain ground with each other after that.

Zelda tired easily, taking long naps in the middle of the day and struggling to focus when she was awake. Hilda came to realise that she was in pain. She denied it when Hilda asked, but often she caught her hunching forward, her arms folded over her stomach and lines of tension tight around her eyes and mouth. The opium must have helped her to manage it.

At night Hilda sat with her, rubbing calming balm into her wrists and singing her songs from their childhood: _Lullay, mine liking, my dear one, mine sweeting; Lullay, my dear heart, mine own dear darling_. When Zelda started awake in the small hours of the morning, babbling incoherently, Hilda was there to stroke hair her hair until her breathing steadied and her eyelids grew heavy again.

By day Zelda was withdrawn and compliant. Hilda revelled in it. Her urge to cosset, sooth and control was like a hunger. She wanted to treat Zelda like a doll: to dress her up, style her hair and take her everywhere with her. She brought her tea and meals, which Zelda ate obediently. She made her new clothes – knitted an emerald green cardigan and sewed dresses in pretty prints of plum, primrose yellow, aqua. She brushed her hair, teasing it into soft curls. She would make suggestions – “Why don’t you sit with me in the greenhouse while I pot up some seedlings?” “Why don’t you come with me when I go to the grocer today?” and Zelda would follow silently – would allow Hilda to hold the crook of her arm as she walked and tuck blankets around her legs when she sat. When she became too overbearing Vinegar Tom positioned himself between them and growled a low warning.

In her more coherent moments, Hilda pressed her on what had happened. How had she come to be cursed? At whose hand? With what intent? Was there nothing that she could think of that might help?

Zelda shook her head, a faraway look on her face. “Let us not talk of it.” Her turn of phrase was often antiquated, Hilda noticed, and sometimes she struggled for words. She wondered how long it had been since Zelda had conversed in English.

* * *

It is Edward who finally got an explanation from Zelda. He came into the kitchen one Sunday afternoon as Hilda was preparing a round of fruit scones and sat heavily at the table.

“The curse was cast by a Russian warlock. Zelda killed him. Apparently it was not the first time someone had attempted to assassinate him and he had taken the precaution of casting a death curse on himself.”

Hilda stopped her kneading. Clumps of wet dough stuck to her fingers where they hovered above the counter. “ _What_?” Death curses were rare and dark magic – a curse that separated a dying witch or warlock’s magic from their body and directed it to attack the person who had killed them.

Edward shook his head, as though shaking his thoughts into order. “He was a very learned warlock – a high priest called Rasputin.”

She wiped her hand on a towel and came to sit with him. “I’ve heard of him. They found his body the day I arrived in Moscow.”

“He was powerful, Hilda,” Edward told her, his tone troubled. “And brilliant – he quite literally wrote the book on the eastern tradition of ritual magic.”

Hilda remembered the anger and fear that those she had spoken to about Rasputin had expressed. “People were afraid of him. Not just witches – mortals too.”

“Mortals are afraid of everything they don’t understand.”

“I can’t believe she would kill a man without good cause. Especially not a priest.”

He nodded. “I tend to agree.” _But who’s to know_? His expression seemed to say. _What do we really know of her anymore_?

“Do you know how to lift a death curse?” she asked, trying to distract him from his doubts.

Edward shook his head. “I’ve never even heard of an instance of one being cast before. I’d half thought they were just a legend.”

“Well clearly they’re not, because our sister is very ill.”

“I know. I will research the subject. In the meantime, there is little we can do except keep her stable.”

He rose to go to his study. Hilda stilled him with a hand on his arm. “Whatever she has done, she is still a Spellman, Edward. And we are all she has.”

He patted her hand. “She’s lucky to have you, Hilda.”

When he left the room, she was pleased to see that smears of floury dough stained his sleeve.

* * *

They tried everything they could think of to lift the curse. Hilda performed all manner of cleansing rituals, rebalancing spells and protective charms, but curse breaking was far from her field of expertise. She accepted that she would not be the one to find the solution. She focused on making Zelda comfortable instead: gave her teas and potions to help manage the discomfort, read to her in the evenings, cooked delicious food to tempt her sickly appetite.

Edward dedicated himself to research. He spent his nights pouring over academic tomes and obscure grimoires. Cassius, the Academy librarian, became a regular visitor to the house, dropping off new volumes and collecting Edward’s discards. From time to time he would make a breakthrough and they would attempt a spell or a ritual. Sometimes it even seemed to work for a few days – Zelda would recover some energy and the hook in her aura seemed to disappear. But the effects never lasted. Within the week the void would grip her magical field again and Zelda would fade and retreat before their eyes.

One evening, several months after she’d first brought Zelda back to the house, she and Edward sat before the fire. Zelda was already in bed – had been so tired after dinner that the two of them had to all but carry her up the stairs. Edward poured them both a glass of whisky and sat staring moodily into the flames. “I don’t think we will find a way to lift this curse,” he announced eventually.

“There must be something,” she said. “If it can be done, it can be undone.”

“It’s a _death curse_ , Hilda. A ball of malice and magic cast by a very powerful warlock to be unleashed at the moment of dying. Everything has a price, and I think the price of this curse is the death of its victim.”

“No,” Hilda shook her head. “That can’t be. After all these years without her – all these years searching – we can’t find Zelda only to let her die. There must be another way.”

“It is cruel, making her go on like this - she’s obviously suffering. We have to accept that there is no alternative.”

“I can’t,” Hilda insisted, tears pricking at her eyes. “I can’t lose her again.”

Edward reached for her hand. “If I am right, the curse will lift at the moment of death. She doesn’t need to _stay_ dead, sister. She just needs to die.”

Hilda stared at him, realisation dawning. “You mean – the Cain pit?”

He nodded. “I believe that if she resurrected, the curse would not resurrect with her.”

 _If_ she resurrected. Hilda considered it. The possibility was tantalising, but it rested on a huge assumption: that the curse would lift at the moment the body died. Without knowing its exact formulation they couldn’t be sure of that. It might equally be that her earthly body was the only thing preventing Zelda from being overwhelmed, and at the point of death the curse would absorb her completely. She shook her head. “It’s too risky, Edward. What if we ended up condemning her to eternal torment instead? At least now she is alive and being cared for, and for as long as she is alive there is a possibility that we might find another way to lift the curse.”

“She’s alive, but she’s not living. We should give her the option.”

Tears pricked at her eyes and a hard lump lodged itself high in her chest. “Please Edward, I couldn’t bear to lose her.”

“It’s what I would want in her position, Hilda.” His voice was firm and reasonable.

He rubbed her back when she cried. There was an inevitability to the idea, now that he had voiced it. It felt to Hilda like an admission of failure. She had let Zelda wonder too far and too long. If only she had followed her instincts far sooner, this need not have happened.

* * *

Edward put the idea to Zelda the next morning. They sat on the porch: Hilda and Zelda side by side on the loveseat, Edward on a lawn chair facing them.

“You don’t have to, love,” Hilda reassured her, holding Zelda’s hand tightly in her own. But Zelda’s eyes had sparked at the suggestion.

“Yes. Yes, that is what we must do.”

“Zelda, you should take some time to think about it,” counselled Edward. “It is not without risk.”

“It’s the only option left,” said Zelda. Her fingers tightened around Hilda’s. She turned to face her. “Will you do it, Sister?”

Hilda gaped at her in surprise. “You want me to…”

“To kill me,” clarified Zelda, when she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

She glanced at Edward. It had been an unspoken assumption between them that he would be the one to do the deed. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to kill someone she loved in cold blood.

“Are you sure?” Edward asked.

Zelda nodded. “ _Please_ Hildie.” There was a note of desperation in her voice.

It was the first time in over a century that Hilda had heard her childhood nickname. How could she refuse her?


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hilda, Zelda and Edward to attempt to lift a death curse, and Hilda remembers the day her mother died.

Hilda kept putting it off. She was waiting to feel ready – ready for the moment when she could kill Zelda without doubt, hesitation or fear of consequences.

She thought poison would be kindest. Not the type of poison that she had administered to their father – a concoction designed to sear and hurt. She wanted to make something smooth and gentle that would feel like falling into a healing sleep. She scoured grimoires for recipes and planted the requisite herbs from seed to ensure she would have only the freshest ingredients.

Zelda grew more and more restless as her pain grew steadily worse. She gave up the pretence that nothing hurt. Her posture became permanently hunched and her skin took on a grey, waxy sheen. Hilda brought her potions to help manage the discomfort and as the weeks wore on, Zelda was in agony by the time the next dose was due.

“Sister, how much longer?” she would ask as Hilda tipped a carefully measured spoonful of potion into her mouth.

“Not much longer,” Hilda reassured her. The herbs were growing well. They might be ready to harvest on the next full moon – and if not this moon, then certainly the one after that.

“I cannot wait another month.” Zelda’s fingers tensed into claws that grasped and braced, searching for relief. There was nothing kind about this curse. It dragged its victim towards death inch by slow tortured inch.

“But what if it doesn’t work?” Hilda reasoned. “What if you don’t come back?”

“I don’t care. I would prefer to die than live like this. Please sister, you have to let me go.”

“I can’t.”

* * *

The herbs were not ready on the full moon. The flowers were still budding – there was a risk that they would not be mature enough to activate the potions if they were harvested now. Zelda wept when Hilda told her.

“Please Hilda. There are many ways to kill a person - I cannot wait another twenty eight days for a herb to flower.”

Thirty five actually. She would need time to dry the herbs after she'd harvested them, and the potion itself took twenty nine hours to brew. Hilda thought it better not to mention this. “I don’t want you to suffer. It will be the kindest way.”

“I’m suffering now!” shouted Zelda, her voice hoarse and cracked. Vinegar Tom jumped to his feet, his hackles raised. “All you are doing is prolonging my suffering! I don’t know how much more I can endure.” Her voice tapered off into a sob – a deep, wracking sob that ran into a spasm of pain. Zelda moaned, clutching uselessly at the bed sheets.

“Shh,” Hilda soothed, running a had through her hair. “Shh, darling, be careful. Here, let me make you more comfortable.” She helped Zelda to lean forward and reached behind her to plump her pillows. She gasped when Zelda reached round and grasped her hand. She met her gaze with a question. “What is it?”

Zelda’s eyes were full of determination. She pulled Hilda’s hand towards her, still gripping the pillow that she had been in the process of re-arranging. “This will do.”

Hilda glanced between Zelda and the pillow that now lay in her lap. It took a moment for her meaning to register. “Zelda, no. I can’t suffocate you.”

“It will not hurt,” Zelda insisted. She lay back, still gripping Hilda’s hand firmly, and tried to pull the pillow over her face.

Hilda resisted. Panic crawled over her body. “Zelds, no, not like this,” she pleaded. “I’m not ready.”

“You will _never_ be ready!”

It was true, Hilda realised as tears spilled over her cheeks. No herb or potion was going to change that. What good was she to Zelda if she did everything for her except the one thing her sister craved? “I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

Zelda released her grip on Hilda’s hand, allowing the pillow to fall onto her chest. Her expression was one of utter resignation.

“I’m sorry,” Hilda said again. “Please, I’ll do anything else – just tell me what you need.”

Vinegar Tom inserted himself between them, growling low in the back of his throat. Zelda’s only response was to turn her head away.

“Here, let me.” Edward nudged Hilda out of the way.

She watched as he sat on the edge of the bed. Zelda turned to look at him, her eyes lighting up in hope.

“Are you sure about this sister?” he asked,

She nodded. “Yes.”

Edward lifted the pillow and placed it over Zelda’s face. Hilda lifted her fist to her mouth and bit down on her knuckle to stop herself from screaming. Edward pressed down hard – she could see the tension in his shoulders and arms through his shirt. Hilda’s heart beat loud in her ears and threatened to hammer out of her chest.

Zelda did not thrash and convulse as their Father had. She wrapped her hands around Edward’s wrists, holding the pillow in place. And then gradually, over the course of a minute or more, her grip weakened and fell away.

Edward waited a moment longer and then lifted the pillow, discarding it on the floor. Zelda lay with her eyes closed, her hair fanned out over the white pillow. She looked more peaceful than she had in weeks. _Centuries, perhaps_.

“Go and get a shovel,” Edward told her. “I’ll bring her downstairs.”

* * *

Hilda had imagined that the burial would be calm. She had intended to place a posy in Zelda’s hands and to say prayers over her body before they covered her in soil soaked with Cain’s blood. In the end it was rushed and panicky. She hacked away at the earth in the pit with a shovel, determined to minimise the amount of time between Zelda dying and her body being buried in the pit.

By the time Edward had carried Zelda down from the house she had already made a sizeable indent at one end of the trench. Edward laid Zelda in the grass and came to help her. Vinegar Tom sat at Zelda’s side, watching the proceedings anxiously. Together they dug a grave – shallow compared to what would be needed for a normal burial, but hopefully this would be no ordinary burial.

“All right sister, I think that will do,” announced Edward, laying down his shovel. They turned to Zelda.

Edward reached for her, but Hilda stopped him with a hand on his arm. “No wait, your hands are dirty.”

“We are burying her, Hilda. She’s going to get dirty.”

Hilda looked at Zelda, lying in her pristine white nightdress in the long grass. What if this was the last time she would ever see her? She couldn’t just throw her into the ground without a second glance. “Just give me – just a moment.” She knelt down, held Zelda’s limp hand in her own, pressed a kiss against her cool forehead. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Tom nudged her with his snout and yapped impatiently. “Are you ready?” asked Edward. There was impatience in his voice too. “I still don’t know how the curse will work after death - I would rather not delay.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” They lifted Zelda’s body into the grave and Edward began shovelling loose dirt over it. Hilda watched, trying to sear the memory of Zelda’s face into her mind. _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_. She winced as Edward covered her face with earth, then patted the mount flat. He was careful not to compact the soil too firmly - hopefully they would be digging it up again soon.

He drove his shovel into the earth beside the pit and came to stand with her. Vinegar Tom lay down over the area where Zelda’s heart was, his head resting on his paws.

“How long do you think it will take if she—”

Edward wiped sweat away from his forehead with a handkerchief. “I’m not sure. I expect that if it is going to work, it will happen within a day.”

“Do you think it will work?”

“I don’t _know_ , Hilda. I’ve never tried to lift a death curse before.” He looked as worried as she felt.

“Will you pray for her?” Hilda asked. “I think Zelda would want that.”

Edward glanced at her. “Yes, I believe she would.”

They knelt side by side in the freshly turned earth and prayed for the Dark Lord’s protection over her immortal soul.

* * *

Hilda couldn’t bear to wait in the house, so she stayed at the graveside with Vinegar Tom. She had seen the Cain Pit used several times before. Once, many years before, she had even been the object of its mysterious powers.

It had been the day that their mother died. Their mother’s death had been unexpected – she was only three and a half centuries old, and had not been unwell. Hilda and Zelda had returned from the academy for the weekend to find her lying at the base of the porch steps, her neck twisted at a horrible angle.

Hilda had been too frightened to approach. She had lingered near the road, watching through her fingers as Zelda ran to their mother. She knelt beside her and touched her neck. Then rooks flew startled out of the trees as Zelda started screaming. The sounds that came out her mouth were inhuman: howls and sobs merged into terrible animal cries. Hilda had turned away, pressing her hands over her ears and squeezing her eyes shut, as though by making herself deaf and blind she might somehow will herself away from the scene before her.

Then she had felt a sudden, sharp pain on the back of her head.

The next thing she knew there was weight pressing down on her and a damp cold all around. She opened her mouth to cry out and dirt fell onto her tongue, choking her. Panicking, she had started thrashing about, pushing against the dark, wet mess that surrounded her. A hand had seized hers, pulling her up through the dirt – up, up into chill night air. Edward. He held her by the shoulders as she sat in the dirt, gasping and clutching at her own limbs. They had felt strange – raw and new, tingling and surging with potential. Her mind too had felt different. It was as if her ability to filter and organise sounds, tastes, sensations, thoughts – her own and other people’s – had been reset. Everything was a rush of mingled feeling that she had to labour to make sense of.

“What happened?” she had asked when she had finally been able to marshal her mouth to make sounds. She had barely registered Edward’s words, seeing instead his memory of arriving at the house. She saw herself and their mother lying dead on the ground, and Zelda in the cemetery, her clothes covered in dirt and blood, still screaming as she scrabbled wildly at the Cain Pit.

She learnt then that knowing what has happened doesn’t mean that one understands why. She could only layer interpretation onto the facts. Zelda’s grief had overflowed. The blow to the back of her head had come from the same place as the feral screams that had torn their way out of her body. Something had broken.

She had intended to ask Zelda about it later that evening, after she had bathed away the blood and dirt. But Zelda hadn’t come to bed that night. The next morning Hilda had found her on the porch. She had been locked out of the house overnight. She sat hugging her knees to her chest: chilled to the bone and beaten raw. Hilda had crouched down next to her, put a hand on her arm, and been flooded with a jolt of grief and guilt so intense that instinctively she had pulled her into a hug. They had clutched each other, Zelda’s tender wounded skin pressed against Hilda’s tender new skin. Hilda had wanted to pull Zelda inside her body so that she could hold her pain for her – smooth it away and make her whole again. She has never stopped wanting to do that.

* * *

She thought about that day for the first time in years as she sat by the Cain Pit, waiting to see whether Zelda would come back to her. In hindsight it had been the beginning of the end of her childhood: her mother was gone, and the following year Zelda had left for England and Edward for the seminary. Hilda’s life had become housekeeping for their father and planting her first garden. And then she too had left.

She looked up and saw two little girls standing by the edge of the pit. They wore pristine white pinafores and their hair was tied in identical sets of pigtails: one blonde, one red. They looked exactly as they had the day she killed her father.

Vinegar Tom didn’t stir – either he couldn’t see them, or he didn’t think them a threat. “Why have you come back?” she asked. “You haven’t come to take her, have you?”

The girls made no reply except to reach for each other’s hand and hold tight.

Hilda pressed her fingers into the dirt of the Cain Pit. She closed her eyes and visualised her magical field, channelling it down into the earth. She imagined it seeping down between the grains of soil, infusing it with energy. She instructed it to find Zelda. _Bring her back to me. Bring her back to me. Bring her back to me_.

She felt something. A spark of energy that wasn’t her own. It stirred deep within the ground, like a seed beginning to germinate.

 _Yes_ , she encouraged, responding with another wave of intention. _Here I am. Here is where you belong_.

There was definitely something there – a dense speck of magic. She reached out for it, brushing against it. It was deep burgundy laced with gold, tightly furled and full of potential. _Zelda!_

Vinegar Tom was on his feet now, body tense and alert as he stared at the ground. Hilda maintained the connection, weaving a web of her own green and mustard magic to encase the seed _. There we are my love, I’ve got you now_.

The Cain Pit’s magic was old and primitive. It worked steadily and would not be rushed. She tempered her urgency, focusing instead on flooding the cocoon she had constructed with love. It was easier now that she had started to believe that Zelda might be returning. Beneath her fingers the seed grew, expanding into a smooth ovoid of energy that grew outwards, reaching gradually towards the surface.

As the moon began to rise, the energy touched the top of the pit. Vinegar Tom ran to it, holding himself poised with intent. Hilda leaned back on her heels, finally removing her fingers from the ground. She wiped them, shrivelled and muddy, against the hem of her cardigan. She didn’t need to burrow into the earth to feel Zelda anymore – the air crackled with her.

And then there was a movement – a coalescence of will. She could feel her reaching out – pushing upwards. Vinegar Tom barked. _We’re here_ , Hilda called out, projecting her own magic like a beacon. _We’re here_.

Tom started scrabbling at the dirt. He uncovered a pale arm that unfolded, a hand that extended out and sought soft fur. Hilda leaned forward, grasping Zelda’s hand firmly in her own. With her other hand she helped scrape the soil away. Zelda gasped for air like a newborn, her eyes wide and shocked.

Vinegar Tom leapt up at her, nuzzling her neck. Zelda wrapped a soil stained arm around him. She coughed, a grating sound against the stillness of the night. Hilda pulled them both into a hug. She pressed kisses into hair gritty and tangy with soil.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She didn’t know who she was thanking – it could have been Zelda or Satan or the Pit or even the Moon that hung over them like a lantern in the night sky. All she knew was that her heart would tear with gratitude if she didn’t find way to release it.

A flash of white in the distance caught her eye. Over Zelda’s shoulder two ghostly figures in white walked hand in hand towards the forest, fading with each step they took.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was really hard to write. Every sentence was ripped unwillingly from the depths of my subconscious. Sorry it took so long! The good news it that while procrastinating from chapter 8 I wrote most of chapter 9, so that shouldn't take as long to post.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda's health is restored by the Cain Pit, but the future does not unfold as Hilda had imagined.

The change in Zelda was immediate. Freed from the curse that had been leaching away her life force, she was strong and energetic. She strode back to the house, Hilda scurrying to keep up. Magic swirled around her so vividly that she was sure any mortal happening to pass by on the road would see it. Hilda had forgotten what it was like to be around a witch as powerful as Zelda: she was intoxicating.

Edward must have heard them approaching because he met them in the hall. “Has it worked?” he asked.

Even as Hilda nodded and replied “Yes,” he was embracing Zelda – lifting her off the ground and swinging her round. Zelda laughed – a deep, bubbling laugh that made Vinegar Tom yap excitedly. Hilda thought her heart might burst with joy. They were all together again at last.

* * *

Hilda prepared them a veritable feast for dinner. While she cooked, Zelda bathed away the grave dirt and came downstairs scrubbed sweet and new. Edward made cocktails. They ate, talked and laughed late into the night. There was so much to catch up on – every story required another story to set the scene.

Hilda told of her time in London and the New Forest, and of the young nephew – Ambrose – that Zelda had never met. Edward mined the more absurd goings-on in the coven for comedy, mercilessly imitating his parishioners. And as for Zelda – she had tales of curse breaking in Egyptian tombs and intrigue at the Emperor’s court in the dying days of the Holy Roman Empire. Hilda had never heard anything like them: stories of desert lands, lost cultures, espionage and extravagant luxury. It seemed extraordinary that someone who had taken part in such events was now sitting at the dining table of a mortuary in a backwoods railway town, eating blackberry crumble and custard.

It was not until the small hours of the morning that they left the table. When Hilda struggled to hide a yawn, Edward finally bade them: “It’s late sisters, and the day has been eventful. Let us to bed. We can continue our discussion tomorrow.”

 _Tomorrow_ , thought Hilda as they climbed the stairs, giddy with alcohol, relief and fatigue. What promise tomorrow held. A new future stretched out before them, filled with possibilities. The only problem was knowing where to start.

* * *

She woke much later than usual the following morning. Zelda stood naked before the mirror, twisted so that she could see the reflection of the creamy expanse of her back over her shoulder. Dresses and cardigans lay strewn on the floor at her feet. Hilda watched as she reached around and ran a finger over the smooth skin of her shoulder blade.

“Are the scars all gone?” she asked.

Zelda jumped at the interruption. “What do you mean?” she asked, turning to look at her.

“It doesn’t just bring the body back to life, it heals it too. Do you remember that scar I used to have on my forehead – the one from that time I fell out of the chestnut tree? When I was in the Cain Pit it vanished. And Edward once fractured his skull in a riding accident and came out of the Pit with it as smooth as a boiled egg.”

Zelda didn’t reply, except to move to the chest of drawers and pull on a slip. Her posture had changed. She was no longer weak and hunched: she stood upright, her spine straight and her head held high. She was still terribly thin though. The lines of bone and sinew were visible under her skin. Now that she was no longer being eaten up from the inside by a curse, she needed feeding up.

“What shall we do today?” Hilda asked, hugging her knees to her chest as she watched Zelda dress. How delicious, to have the luxury of a whole day stretching before them to fill. And another after that.

“I need to go outside,” said Zelda, brushing out her hair. “I have been cooped up indoors for months.”

“I was planning to run some errands in Greendale. You could come with me if you like?”

“I thought I might walk in the forest.”

“Oh, well that sounds lovely. Why don’t we go together?” suggested Hilda.

“I don’t wish to interrupt your plans. I have taken up far too much of your time these last few months.”

“It’s not an imposition, Zelda. You’re my sister – I was glad to take care of you. It’s just so good to have you home.”

Zelda stood in her slip, her eyes scanning the room.

“What are you looking for?” Hilda asked.

“Something to wear.”

“Will none of these do?” She gestured to the discarded dresses that littered the floor: the pretty floral dresses that Hilda had made for her.

Zelda shook her head. “Did you bring any of my clothes from Hong Kong back here?”

“Yes!” remembered Hilda. “In fact, I have a surprise for you. Come with me.”

Zelda looked at her quizzically, but she followed as Hilda led the way into the hall and up the stairs to the attic. Vinegar Tom’s claws clicked on the wooden floorboards as he trailed behind them.

“I put your trunk from Hong Kong up here. And these,” she said, gesturing to the packing crates stacked against the far wall, “are your belongings from Moscow.”

“Moscow?” Zelda’s tone was sharp with surprise.

“I was there - in 1917. I missed you by days.”

“You should not have tried to follow me," Zelda told her, her voice curt. "It wasn’t safe – you could have been hurt.”

A vision of Zelda’s housekeepers lying side by side in a pool of mingled blood flashed through Hilda's mind. “Or perhaps if I had reached you a few days earlier I could have _helped_ you.”

She shook her head. “It was –” she glanced upwards, struggling for words. “My life in Moscow was not your concern. You didn’t belong there.”

A familiar spike of abandonment made Hilda shrill: “And what about Hong Kong? Was your life there also not my concern? Because if I hadn’t found you when I did you would have _died_ on the floor of that Satan-forsaken bungalow. Your soul would be in the grip of eternal torment right now.”

Dust danced in the motes of silence that followed her outburst. Zelda stood mutely, her thin arms folded across her abdomen.

Vinegar Tom stepped between them and Hilda understood that this line of conversation would progress no further.

“Why don’t we have breakfast?” she suggested brightly, weighting her voice with apology. “And then you can unpack.”

* * *

Hilda left Zelda sorting through packing crates and went into Greendale to buy ingredients for chocolate eclairs and Lancashire hotpot. At Zelda’s request, she also bought a bolt of black wool crepe and a carton of cigarettes. When she had had balked at the latter, Zelda had asked ‘would you rather I smoked opium?” and she couldn’t in all honesty answer ‘yes’ to that.

By the time she returned, a plume of black smoke was billowing from the back of the house. She walked around the building and found Zelda standing before a huge bonfire built of dismantled packing crates. Beside her lay heaps of books and clothing which she was tossing into the flames.

“Zelda!” she grabbed her arm to save an exquisite teal dress from being added to the pyre. “What are you doing?”

Zelda looked at her with far away eyes. “Disposing of unneeded items.”

Hilda took the dress from her. It contained tens of hours of skilled work – it must have cost more to make than Hilda had spent on clothes in the last twenty years. “This is too lovely to throw on the fire. Why don’t we see if I can alter it for you? This colour will look beautiful with your hair. I could drop the waist, raise them hemline – perhaps open the neck a little.”

“And where shall I wear it?” asked Zelda in a flat tone. “This dress was made for an audience with the Tsar. He is dead. The empires have all fallen now. There are no more tsars, no more emperors. Just the grocers and haberdashers of Greendale.”

“Oh Zelds.” Hilda rubbed her back. Zelda’s spine was tense and rigid. “Don’t you want a reminder of the past – of all the wonderful things you’ve seen?”

“A heart that dwells in the past is not at liberty to serve the Dark Lord.” Zelda replied. Her words were delivered in a monotone, like a prayer that had become so familiar that its meaning was conveyed by the act of praying rather than the component words.

“Well, why don’t I keep it for you then?” she suggested, folding the dress carefully over her arm. “There must be fifteen yards of silk here. Even if you don’t want to wear it again, I’m sure I can find another use for the fabric.”

“As you wish,” Zelda allowed. There was a distance on her - she stood behind a stillness that Hilda couldn’t interpret.

“I’ll take these things back inside. You must be tired," she added, running a soothing hand along her arm. "Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

Zelda shook her head. “I am not tired. I think I will walk now.”

“All right my love. Don’t go too far. The forest looks different than it did the last time you saw it, I don’t want you to get lost.”

* * *

She was in the kitchen when Edward returned from the Academy that evening, piping whipped cream into choux fingers.

“Why does it smell of smoke outside?” he asked, placing his briefcase on the kitchen table.

“Zelda had a bonfire. She wanted to burn some of her belongings from Moscow.”

“Are you crying, sister?”

Hilda swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yes,” she admitted. It had built up over the afternoon. A discomfort as she’d hauled armfuls of dresses and books back up to the attic. A creeping sense of anti-climax when Zelda had returned from her walk as the light started to fade and gone straight upstairs without a word. Then, as she’d worked through the familiar motions of mixing roux and whipping cream, it had coalesced into a grief that refused to be contained.

“What has upset you?” Edward asked.

She looked up at the ceiling and blinked, trying to push back a fresh wave of tears. “It’s not how I thought it would be,” she confessed. “With Zelda I mean. I thought that if the curse lifted, things would be as they were before.”

“As they were before what?”

“Before she left.”

Edward adopted what she thought of as his pastoral expression – patient and politely sympathetic. “That was the best part of two hundred years ago, Hilda. You were both girls. We know very little about Zelda the woman: only that she chose to stay away for all that time.”

A sob clawed its way out of Hilda’s throat. She set down the piping bag, giving up on her baking for the time being.

“Zelda died and came back to life yesterday,” Edward reminded her. “That is rather a dramatic event by anyone’s standards. Give her a little time to adjust.”

Hilda pressed sticky fingers to her mouth and tried to believe him. “Yes, I know, I know. I’ll be more patient.”

* * *

She tried to be patient, but nothing was as she’d hoped or imagined. She and Zelda no longer went through the day side by side. The closer she tried to get to her, the more Zelda seemed to seek out solitude. She walked in the forest, pored over texts that Edward brought back from the Academy in the study, passed hours smoking on the porch.

She missed the contact that they had when she was nursing Zelda – the dozens of times a day she would smooth, support and embrace her. Now when she found excuses to touch Zelda she was firm and unyielding. She sewed Zelda a new wardrobe, making new dresses from the bolt of black crepe and re-fashioning half a dozen Moscow gowns. She deliberately drew out the fitting process, delighting to have a period of time when Zelda was compelled to stand still while she measured and pinned. At least when she was on a dressmaker’s block, complaining about being stuck with pins, Hilda knew where she was. Every time Zelda disappeared in the forest she was terrified that she would leave again.

In the evenings, after they had said the evening office together, she and Edward sat discussing theological matters. Zelda had become somewhat of an expert in the Eastern tradition during her travels. Hearing the buzz of their conversation as she stood preparing dinner in the kitchen, Hilda experienced the pangs she had felt when she had been banished from the school room as a child – consigned to play with dolls while her older siblings studied together. She shouldn’t feel this way, she told herself. After all, she was the one who had encouraged Edward to spend time with Zelda. She should be happy to see them getting on so well.

But part of her smarted that it was Edward and not she that Zelda sought out. She wanted to be the one to whom Zelda imparted her ideas – the one to whom she listened so attentively. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising, she mused. Edward’s life was full of the Church, the Academy, his research. What did she have to offer beyond the four walls of this house – her recipes, her sewing, her garden? She began to fear herself dull and uninteresting. It made her feel small in a way she had not since her father died.

The only time she found the closeness that she craved was when Zelda had nightmares. They came often. Hilda would wake in the night to a panic that was not her own and hear Zelda’s ragged breathing in the next bed. The first time it happened she had tried to reassure her, but Zelda had feigned sleep. After that she took to sliding wordlessly into her sister’s bed. In the darkness Hilda would hold her in her arms and Zelda would burrow her face into her neck, just as it had been when they were girls. In the dead of night, Zelda’s tears wet on her shoulder, Hilda found the piece of herself that had been missing. But their intimacy never survived the dawn. The following day Zelda was always moody and uncommunicative, taking herself off to the forest or the attic for hours at a time.

* * *

Now that Zelda was better, she attended Black Mass at the desecrated church rather than receiving the unholy sacrament from Edward at home. They sat side by side in the front row. Often Zelda listened with her eyes close, rapt with attention. Hilda took the opportunity to drink in the angles of her face.

After mass witches and warlocks crowded around Zelda. The presence of one of their own who had been away long enough to become interesting was magnetic: novelty was in short supply in Greendale. Hilda hated those glamorous, worldly witches who seemed to know what to say to elicit a smile and a flurry of words from Zelda. She hated Faustus Blackwood even more. He was always among the crowd. As the others drifted away, he would take Zelda’s arm and ask her opinion on some aspect of the sermon or other. “You may go, Sister Hilda,” he would tell her. “I’m sure you have business to attend to. I will see to it that your sister gets home safely.”

Hilda walked home alone, flowers wilting in her wake, and muttered hexes on him. She had always harboured an irrational dislike of Faustus Blackwood – had realised latterly that it was because he reminded her of their father. They bore little physical resemblance, but there was something in his manner and the fervency of his devotion to doctrine that chafed. Her dislike was only fuelled by the fact that Zelda seemed happy to stay and talk to him when some days she could barely drag a word out of her.

They argued sometimes – or rather they had the same argument over and again. _You’re never here_ Hilda accused. _You’re suffocating me_ Zelda complained. Voices raised and doors were slammed, but it was oddly formal – the way that strangers argued. They knew each other too much and not at all. Edward told them to be patient. Hilda began to wonder what it was that they were all waiting for.

* * *

On Samhain Hilda looked out of the window to see Zelda standing in the graveyard. Her new clothes were all sombre colours tailored in sharp, angular styles: black, oxblood, forest green. Hilda wouldn’t have seen her if it hadn’t been for the flash of her golden hair against the muted backdrop of the forest.

Hilda picked her way over the grass, the heavy dew soaking through her thin indoor shoes. Zelda was standing before their parents' graves, gazing at the inscriptions. As Hilda drew closer she saw that there was a wreath at the foot of each headstone. Holly, ivy and yew: offerings to honour and pacify their restless spirits on the day when the dead might come back to walk among the living.

“Ooh, those are pretty,” she breathed. “I must confess, I don’t leave flowers very often any more.” But then, it was eighty years since she had buried her father – and by the end she had hardly mourned his passing. Their mother’s death seemed like another lifetime ago.

Zelda said nothing, just took a drag of her cigarette. Hilda hadn’t resigned herself to the habit yet, but she had stopped bothering to try and talk her out of it.

“Did you know that Father had died?” she asked. She was never sure how much Zelda had known of their lives in the years she was away.

Zelda shook her head. “I supposed that he must have, given his age. But I wasn’t sure. Were you there?”

Hilda nodded. “Yes, for the last few months. He didn’t go easily. I think he was afraid. I thought about summoning you – so you had a chance to say goodbye, but Edward—” she tapered off, unsure how to finish the sentence.

Zelda shrugged tightly. “I don’t suppose he would have wanted to see me.”

She wished she could tell her otherwise.

“I always hoped that one day he would be proud of me.” Zelda’s voice cracked over the words.

She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. “Why?”

Zelda's surprise mirrored her own. “He was a great man – a high priest.”

“He was a cruel bully,” Hilda told her incredulously.

“He was one of the most devout people I’ve ever known. Everything he did was in service to the Dark Lord.”

“Zelda, he beat you raw time and time again,” she reminded her.

“He did what he thought was right.” Zelda's tone was infuriatingly dispassionate.

Anger pricked at her. “He didn’t care about what was right! He saw a little girl who was more powerful and more intelligent than he was and it _frightened_ him, so he bullied and belittled her to make himself feel better. He might have pretended it was in service to the Dark Lord, but the only person he served was _himself_.”

Zelda was staring at her with wide eyes and an unreadable expression. Hilda continued, because she felt Zelda needed to hear it and she certainly needed to say it. “I was with him when he died. I came back to nurse him, and every day I spent in his company I felt a little more dirty and stained until I couldn’t stand it any more.” The words bubbled up out of her, relieved to be given voice at last. “I gave him tea laced with cyanide and strychnine. I wasn’t trying to kill him – he was close to death anyway. I just wanted him to suffer. I wanted to see him endure just a small _fraction_ of what he put you through. He realised what I was doing - he looked me in the eyes the whole time. I think he was glad, in a way - it meant that he didn’t have to find the courage to succumb to death.”

She was shocked by the bitterness in her own tone. She hadn’t realised, after all this time, that she still felt so strongly. Zelda just stood, her gaze unblinking. “Please say something,” she begged her.

Her response, when it came, was so quiet that she had to strain to hear it. “You killed him, who you profess to hate, but you would not kill me.”

Hilda looked at the way Zelda gripped her own arms tightly about herself, her fingernails leaving crescent moon wounds in soft flesh. She recalled how Zelda’s hands had become clawed and desperate as the pain had eaten away at her – the low groans of agony she would try to suppress while waiting for her next dose. Hilda had been so afraid of the pain of losing her that she had condemned Zelda to months of pain as a result of her own inaction. “I’m sorry,” she told her, blinking back tears. She always seemed to be on the verge of crying these days.

“For what?”

“That I couldn’t do as you asked. I never wanted to hurt you. It’s just that I was so frightened of losing you when I’d only just got you back.”

She saw something glitter dark and cold in Zelda’s eyes. It looked like shame. “It is I who should be sorry, sister. I tried to drag you down to my level. It was selfish.”

“No,” Hilda insisted, shaking her head. “You were in pain, I should have helped you.”

“From a curse I brought upon myself,” she said bitterly. “It was no more than I deserved.”

“No my love, you don’t deserve to be in pain.”

Zelda was silent, but when Hilda looked at her she saw there were tears running down her face. “Oh my darling, don’t cry.”

She tried to pull her into a hug but Zelda pushed her away. She was stronger than she had been when she was under the curse and Hilda was unprepared. She staggered, then fell backwards into the wet grass. By the time she had righted herself Zelda was running towards the forest, Vinegar Tom close at her heels.

“Zelda, wait!” she shouted, scrambling to her feet.

“Let her go, Hilda.”

She turned to see Edward standing on the other side of the fence, dressed for the Academy with overcoat and briefcase. “But she’s upset.”

“She needs some time to herself. She’ll come back when she’s ready, but if you try to follow her she’ll keep running.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I've finally updated. COVID-19 made my working life very busy for while but it's settled down again - albeit that I'm now working from my spare room because my community's in lockdown. The bad news is that things got a bit out of hand and this chapter isn't, as originally advertised, the last. This story really is nearly finished now though. I hope this chapter keeps you entertained until the last one is ready.

Zelda didn’t come home that evening. Hilda tried not to worry. Maybe Edward was right: perhaps Zelda simply needed some time alone.

She abandoned any pretence at calm when Vinegar Tom returned the following day. Hilda was hanging laundry on the line when he emerged from the woods, his tail lowered.

“Tom, where’s Zelda?” she asked, running to meet him. She scanned the tree line, hoping to see her emerging from the gloom.

Vinegar Tom stared at her gloomily and whined.

“Isn’t she with you?”

Tom just plodded towards the house. When he reached the porch he lay down, chin resting on his front paws, and gazed back towards the forest. Zelda wasn’t following him, she realised – at least, not any time soon. Vinegar Tom was waiting too. Something about the resignation with which he did it told her that this wasn’t a new dynamic.

How could she _not_ worry when her sister’s familiar sat out on the porch day and night, pining? What state of mind must Zelda be in, if she would not even allow Vinegar Tom to stay with her? The two were normally inseparable. He was still alive – for now, at least – so she clung onto hope that wherever she was, at least Zelda was alive too. For now.

Hilda searched everywhere she could think of: the woods, the desecrated church, the shops that they frequented in Greendale. There was no trace of Zelda. After a fruitless day she arrived at the Academy, anxiety crawling over her skin like cold water.

Class had just finished. Students crowded through the atrium, laughing and chattering on their way to dorms, sports practice and dinner. The noise was disorienting. She stopped, looking for a way through the sea of bodies. A warlock jostled against her, knocking her sideways.

“Sorry,” Hilda muttered, righting herself.

“Mind where you’re going!” bellowed a voice behind her.

Hilda jumped and turned to look at the speaker. Father Blackwood was marching towards her, students shrinking away to clear a path. She thought at first that he was talking to her, but as he got closer he fixed his glare on the young warlock who had bumped into her.

“Did you even notice Sister Spellman in your haste to get wherever it is that you are going?” he demanded. Silence had fallen over the atrium. All eyes were turned towards them.

“S-sorry Father,” he stammered.

“It is not me you should be apologising to.”

“I’m sorry, Sister,” the warlock told her, his cheeks flushed bright red.

“It’s all right,” Hilda reassured him. “It was an accident. No harm done.”

“It was careless and ungallant,” Faustus continued sternly. “I expect such behaviour from mortals, but warlocks should hold themselves to a higher standard.”

“Yes Father,” the boy agreed, his head bowed in contrition.

“Report to the library and tell Cassius you are in need of a detention task.”

“Father Blackwood, please,” Hilda insisted. “It was just an accident.”

“One that will not be repeated. Now get out of my sight before I assign you any additional punishment.”

The poor boy scurried away. The silence lasted for a moment longer, finally broken by a low buzz of conversation from the other students.

“Sister Hilda, what brings you to the Academy?” asked Faustus, guiding her by the elbow to the edge of the room. “Father Edward is at a Council meeting. He won’t return until later.”

“Could we—” Hilda glanced around at the crowds of students still milling around. “Could we go somewhere else?”

“Of course,” said Father Blackwood, his brow creasing in a studied display of concern. “Let me show you to your brother’s office.”

Hilda followed Faustus. Students cleared a path for them as they went – seemingly no one wanted to cross Father Blackwood. He made no attempt at small talk, and Hilda felt no urge to break the silence. Only once the door to Edward’s office was closed behind them did Faustus ask “Is something troubling you, sister?”

“I’m looking for my sister. Have you seen her?”

He frowned. “Sister Zelda? No, she hasn’t been here today.”

“What about earlier this week? Have you come across her anywhere.”

She was surprised by the tint of evasiveness that crept into his aura. “Has something happened?” he asked.

“She has been away for several days and I need to find her,” Hilda told him, clinging to the facts tightly. She didn’t like giving anything of her sister to this man. He made her skin crawl.

“I did see her a few days ago,” he admitted.

“Where?” Hilda demanded.

“In the forest. I was at the altar making an offering for Samhain. I – believe she intended to do the same.”

“What happened?” asked Hilda. This was the first time that she had found someone who had seen Zelda since she had left the mortuary that day.

“We spoke. She sought my counsel on a – spiritual matter.”

“And then?”

“And then we went our separate ways. I assumed she went home.”

There was more – she could tell there was more, but she couldn’t accuse him of withholding information without telling him more than she was willing. Instead she reached out with her mind, gently brushing against the edge of his consciousness. She pushed aside layers of pine branches and velvet drapes. Incense and mossy earth. There was a figure up ahead – golden hair glinting in the dappled light, and then—

The shutters of his mind closed abruptly against her. “Was there something else, sister?” asked Faustus.

“No,” Hilda told him. “I’ll just wait here for Edward.”

“Very well.” He paused at the door, his hand poised over the handle. “I hope you and your sister are able to resolve your differences soon, Hilda.”

There was mockery in his gaze. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to rip and tear and squash him. She smiled. “Thank you, Father.”

* * *

On the fourth day they received a phone call from the owner of a speakeasy in Riverdale. Did they know a Zelda Spellman? If so, they should come and collect her before he dumped her in the street and let the police to deal with her.

They took the hearse. Edward drove. Hilda sat beside him, chewing her fingernails. They didn’t speak. It was the height of prohibition. In big cities speakeasies may have been glamorous venues hidden in disused churches and behind unassuming shop fronts, but in Riverdale it was the back room of a weather-beaten warehouse near the railway line.

The manager of the speakeasy was the foreman. They met him in the warehouse, surrounded by stacks of packing boxes and household furniture shrouded in dustsheets.

“We are here to collect Zelda Spellman,” Edward told him.

The foreman glanced between them, taking in Edward’s clerical collar and Hilda's neat kid gloves. “You sure you know a Zelda Spellman? You don’t look like her kind of folk.”

“And what kind of folk would that be?” asked Edward. Hilda felt his magic bristle.

“You look respectable like and this woman…well, she ain’t. I ain’t never seen a broad put away so much liquor before.”

“If you’re worried about her lowering the tone of you _establishment_ ,” Edward told him, glancing around in a manner that communicated exactly what he thought of the respectability of said establishment, “then perhaps you can show us to her, and we will take her off your hands.”

“All right, no need to get hoity toity about it.” The foreman led them to the back room. It was dingy, the only daylight coming from a grimy window set high up in the wall. A bar made of packing crates ran parallel to one wall. Opposite was a collection of scuffed sofas and tables – damaged goods from the warehouse stock.

Zelda lay on one of the sofas with her back to them. A grubby tarpaulin had been pulled over her as a makeshift blanket.

“Zelds!” Hilda rushed to her side, memories of finding her on the floor of that awful house in Hong Kong returning to her. But this time Zelda was merely asleep. She stirred at the sound of her name, and turned away from the hand that Hilda placed against her clammy forehead.

“Is she all right?” asked Edward.

“She will be, once she’s sobered up.”

“Might take awhile,” the foreman told them. “I’ve seen grown men die drinkin’ less.”

“And yet you continued to serve her,” observed Edward.

Hilda ignored their barbed conversation and focused instead on trying to coax Zelda into a sitting position. “Time to get up love, we’re going home. You can have a proper rest in your own bed. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”

“Leave me alone, Hildie,” muttered Zelda, rolling onto her front and pulling the tarpaulin over her head. Her voice was slurred.

She beckoned Edward over. “You’re going to have to help me,” she told him.

Between the two of them they manoeuvred Zelda into the back of the hearse, where she immediately sprawled out and went back to sleep.

“If my sister ever visits your establishment again, I expect you to call me immediately,” Edward told the foreman. “If you do not, I will see to it that you and your establishment are permanently indisposed.”

Hilda could feel his anger – he was restraining himself from harming the man. It was unusual to sense such strong emotions from Edward. Her life had begun to feel very out of control, she realised, and she did not like it.

* * *

Zelda was more alert by the time they got back to the house. Alert enough to walk up the front steps with Edward’s assistance. Hilda went ahead and opened the door for them.

Vinegar Tom stood waiting at the top of the steps, his little body tense with expectation. But he made no noise and no effort to touch Zelda, just followed her inside. They had done this before. How many times had it taken, Hilda wondered, for Tom to learn exactly how close he could get without Zelda pushing him away?

They stood in the hall, Zelda swaying on her feet. The stench of alcohol, smoke and sweat had followed them into the house.

“Take her upstairs,” Hilda told Edward. “I’ll bring some tea up in a moment.”

“I can take myself upstairs,” Zelda said, pulling herself free from Edward’s grip and almost overbalancing in the process.

“You can barely stand,” Hilda told her, frustration and disgust vying for precedence. “For once, let someone help you.”

Zelda glared at her, although her eyes seemed to be struggling to focus. “When I need help, I will ask for it.”

“You will _never_ ask for help!” Hilda shouted, her frustration winning out. “You’d die first!”

“I _did_ ask for your help,” Zelda responded, her voice low and steady, even if her gait was not. “And you refused.”

Zelda had found her sore spot and pressed it. Hilda instinctively pressed right back. “If you keep pushing away the people who love you, one day they will _stop_ loving you. Satan help me, I’m finding it hard to love you at the moment.”

She felt a spike of pain so acute that she wasn’t sure whether it was hers or Zelda’s. They stared at each other in shock. Then Vinegar Tom was at her feet, growling a warning.

“Sisters,” interjected Edward, stepping between them. “Not now, please. This day has been trying enough already. Hilda, make that tea. Zelda, go and change out of those filthy clothes.”

Hilda watched as Zelda walked unsteadily to the stairs. She stumbled on the first step and caught herself just before her knees hit the sharp edge. Slowly, leaning heavily on the bannister, she pulled herself up the stairs. Vinegar Tom followed behind her.

Edward stood beside Hilda, observing. When Zelda had reached the top of the stairs and fumbled her way down the corridor, he turned to her. “Sister, will you…I can’t…”

She’d never seen such helplessness in Edward. He was always so calm - so measured. Even when he had been searching in vain for a way to lift the death curse, he had not looked so hopeless.

“I will look after her,” she promised.

* * *

Hilda prepared an infusion of milk thistle, nettle, meadowsweet and creeping thyme. The brew was bitter. She sweetened it with lavender and honey, then added a few drops of cleansing tincture. She needed the time in the kitchen – grinding, steeping and stirring – to ready herself.

She found Zelda sitting on the edge of her bed, still fully clothed. Her head was bent, her face hidden behind ratty strands of hair.

“Drink this,” Hilda told her, setting the teacup on the nightstand. “I’ll run you a bath.”

She ran the bath hot, and added almond milk, salt, camomile and rosemary to the water. She was surprised on returning to the bedroom to find that Zelda had drunk the tea. She looked up as Hilda entered the room, her gaze clearer.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

Zelda nodded.

“Come on then, let’s get you cleaned up.” She led Zelda into the bathroom. She was steadier on her feet, but her movements were stiff. “Put your clothes in the hamper,” she told her. “I’ll check the water.”

“Hildie.”

Zelda’s hand on her arm was a shock. She looked down at it. Her fingers were stained with grime, and something rusty was caked under her nails. “What?” She couldn’t keep the hardness out of her tone.

“I’m sorry,” Zelda said, her voice quiet and cracked.

“Sorry for what?” she demanded. “Sorry for disappearing without so much as a word to tell us where you were? Sorry for putting yourself in Satan only knows what kind of danger? Sorry that Edward and Tom and I have been out of our minds with worry?”

“Yes,” said Zelda simply.

Hilda looked her in the eye. She found contrition there, and fear. “If you are really sorry then why do you keep doing the same thing over and over again?”

Zelda shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

Hilda’s anger couldn’t withstand the terrible vulnerability in Zelda’s face. She reached for the hand that still lay on her arm, squeezed the fingers gently. “Let’s get you nice and clean, and then you can get some rest.”

Zelda undressed while Hilda checked the bath. She added a little more hot water and rosemary, and stirred the water to mix in the almond milk. She gasped when she looked up to see Zelda standing beside the bath. It was clear that she had not spent the entirety of the last four days napping on the couch of a Riverdale speakeasy. Her knees were grazed. Her hips and thighs were mottled with bruises.

“Oh Zelds,” Hilda breathed, straightening up.

Zelda’s expression was distant, as though part of her wasn’t really there.

“What happened?” she asked, but she didn’t really expect an answer. She helped Zelda into the bath. There was more. Deep scratches scored her back – echoes of the scars that the Cain Pit had erased. Most disconcertingly of all, a bite mark ringed one of her shoulder blades like a string of garnet beads.

Zelda sat with her knees clutched to her chest, staring straight ahead. Hilda gently washed her limbs and rinsed her hair. She brushed dirt from under her fingernails and rubbed a healing salve into the wounds on her back. She hummed a lullaby and tried to envelop her in a cloud of camomile and love. She was combing Zelda’s hair, patiently teasing out the knots, when she heard her say something.

“What was that?” she asked, leaning forward so that she could see her face.

Zelda’s gaze was lowered. “He hurt me,” she whispered.

“Who did, precious?” Hilda pressed, running a hand over her damp hair.

Barely any sound accompanied the movement of Zelda’s lips. “Father.”

“Oh.” She stroked Zelda’s cheek. Gently, so that she wouldn’t pull away from the touch. “Oh my darling, I know he did.”

Zelda’s eyes were squeezed tightly closed. Hilda saw flashes in her memory – dark wood and leather-bound books. The smell of incense. Shame and dread and the bite of pain into tender flesh. “He hurt me,” she repeated, the words a bitterly won confession.

“He did. And you didn’t deserve it,” Hilda reassured her, still stroking her cheek. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Hildie,” Zelda reached for her, her breath hitching in a sob.

“Shh,” Hilda told her, pulling her into an embrace. It was an awkward thing, both of them twisted over the edge of the bath. But Zelda clung to her tightly – desperately – as she sobbed, and Hilda couldn’t bear to let her go. “Shh, my love, it’s all right. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Zelda cried loudly and messily. Sobs wracked her chest. Tears and bathwater soaked through the fabric of Hilda’s dress. Hilda held her. She cradled the back of her head. She tried to absorb Zelda’s pain into her own body. Tears ran down her cheeks at the rawness of it. Zelda needed this release – had needed it for decades.

She looked up at one point to see Edward standing in the doorway. His eyes were wide at the sight of them, at the dreadful sounds coming from Zelda. Hilda nodded at him to indicate that he should go. _I can manage_. He nodded in response and pulled the door shut behind himself. He looked troubled, but mainly relieved.

When Zelda was finally spent, Hilda let her rest her head against her shoulder until she was calm. When her breathing had fallen into an even rhythm again, she gently squeezed Zelda’s shoulder. “This water’s getting cold. Let’s get you dry and tucked up in bed.”

Zelda made a noise, its meaning muffled against Hilda’s shoulder. “I’m not a child,” she said as she pulled away, her voice thick and hoarse.

“No,” Hilda agreed, reaching for a towel and holding it up for her to step into. “But everyone needs looking after sometimes.”

Zelda changed into a nightgown while Hilda turned down her sheets for her. “Shall I bring you some more tea?” she asked as Zelda climbed into bed. “Perhaps some nice foxglove?”

Zelda shook her head. Her eyes were still red from crying and she looked…bashful. “I’m exhausted. I don’t think I shall need it.”

“Very well, then.” She pulled the blankets over Zelda’s shoulders. Vinegar Tom jumped up on the bed and nestled into her side. Hilda smiled as Zelda reached to pet him. “He’s missed you. He sat on the porch for days just waiting for you to come home.”

“He’s my best boy,” said Zelda, draping her arm over him and scratching his head. Her eyelids drooped drowsily.

Hilda stroked Zelda’s hair away from her face. “Sleep well darling.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. “For coming to find me.”

“I’ll always come and find you,” she promised, pressing a kiss to Zelda’s temple. “You never have to be alone.”

* * *

She felt disoriented. The day had been long and thick with emotion. She went downstairs to the kitchen, because she always felt the most grounded there. Edward was sitting at the table, a decanter of whisky and a glass in front of him. The clock on the wall read a little after half past nine.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him. Neither of them had eaten since lunch.

Edward shook his head. He topped up his glass from the decanter instead. Hilda made herself a sandwich and sat opposite him to eat it. “How is she?” he asked.

“Exhausted,” Hilda told him. “Poor little lamb could barely keep her eyes open.”

“How did she—” he gestured vaguely at his back. “And who in Satan’s name _bit_ her?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that.”

He looked confused. “Then what—why was she crying?”

“I—,” she sighed, not sure how to explain it to Edward of all people, and frustrated that she had to. He grew up in the same house as them - how could he not understand? “It’s complicated. She’s mourning for the child that she wasn’t allowed to be.”

He took a long sip of whisky. “I don’t know what to do. She is my responsibility, as much as any member of the coven, and I don’t know where to begin. I don’t understand her.”

Hilda set down her sandwich. “Of course you don’t. You were always the favoured child: the high priest in waiting. A _man_. You’ve always been admired and respected. You don’t understand what it is to crave attention, or to fear rejection.”

He looked up from his glass, his eyes narrowed. “Is that how you feel, sister?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But it is worse for Zelda. I always had her to turn to. She only had—” 

“Me,” Edward finished. He ran his hands over his face. “You see – I don't understand anything. I feel so helpless.”

“So does she,” Hilda explained. “She might seem worldly and sophisticated, but deep inside she feels helpless too. She needs to feel valued, and useful, and wanted. _That’s_ how you can help her.”

He took another sip of his drink. “Perhaps I’m too close. I’ll speak to Faustus. He is very good at pastoral care. I might encourage him to take her under his wing.”

“ _No_!” she slapped her hand against the table. “Stop being such a _coward_! It is you she needs, not Faustus Blackwood. If you _must_ speak to that man, ask him what happened between him and Zelda at Samhain.”

Edward shrunk from the anger in her voice. “Hilda – what? Faustus couldn’t have seen Zelda at Samhain – that’s when she disappeared.”

“He did. They met in the woods – at the ritual altar. He told me she asked him for spiritual counsel. So before you palm our sister off so eagerly onto that man, ask him what pastoral care he showed her then.”

They stared at each other across the table. “You are a formidable witch, Hilda,” Edward said finally. “I forget that sometimes.”

“It’s not that you forget, it’s that you don’t see what’s in front of you.” She pushed her plate away, no longer hungry. “I’m going to bed. Don’t drink too much.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda makes a confession and Edward faces an uncomfortable truth.

Hilda slept in later than normal the next morning and woke to a silent house. She felt a twinge of panic when she saw Zelda’s empty bed. She dressed quickly and searched the house, hoping she would find Zelda and Edward together – drinking coffee at the kitchen table, or praying the Satanic office in the parlour - but the house was empty. Edward’s coat was missing from the coat stand in the hall but Zelda’s was still there. That suggested that wherever they were, they weren’t together.

Shrugging on her own coat, Hilda went outside to check the grounds. She didn’t have to look far. Zelda was on the porch, cigarette dangling from her fingers and Vinegar Tom lying at her side.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked, taking in Zelda’s bare forearms. “It’s the middle of November, you’ll catch your death of cold.”

“I’ve lived in colder places than Greendale in November,” Zelda commented with a roll of her eyes that told her she found Hilda’s concern unnecessary.

“Where’s Edward?”

“At the Academy I assume.”

“But it’s Saturday.”

“And I am not his keeper, Hilda. He was gone before I got up. He didn’t leave an itinerary.”

Hilda nodded. Edward was a grown man and not prone to bursts of self-destructive behaviour. He was probably fine. “How are you feeling?” she asked, taking a few steps towards her.

“Far better than I have any right to,” Zelda told her, exhaling a stream of blue smoke into the morning mist.

To Hilda’s eye she looked tired and brittle, but at least she was here. And sober. “It’s cold out, why don’t you come inside? I’ll make us some breakfast.”

Zelda shook her head. “I – would you sit with me a moment?”

Hilda glanced back over her shoulder. “Well, I’ll just make us some tea first, shall I? Maybe fetch you a blanket–”

“Hilda, _please_.” There was strain in Zelda’s voice. “There’s something I need to tell you and if I don’t do it now, I’m not sure I ever will.”

“Oh. Oh I see.”

Vinegar Tom leapt onto the floor, making space for her on the loveseat. Hilda sunk into it. She wanted to reach out and touch Zelda – as much for her own reassurance as Zelda’s – but she wasn’t sure how receptive she would be. “What’s wrong?” she asked when Zelda didn’t speak. “You’re not– you’re not going away again are you?”

“That depends on whether you wish me to,” said Zelda, lighting another cigarette with unsteady hands.

“No! Why would you think that? There is nothing I want more than to have you here with me.”

Zelda exhaled smoke and a bitter bark of a laugh. “Wait until you hear what I have to say before you promise that.”

She didn’t meet Hilda’s eye – her gaze was fixed on a spot on the railings in front of her. Hilda clenched her hands together. The tension rolling off Zelda was setting her on edge. “Whatever it is, just say it.”

Zelda took a deep breath. Hilda watched her mouth move soundlessly several times, before she finally croaked “I killed our mother.”

The words hung in silence for several moments before Hilda marshalled herself to respond. “What?” Of all the things she had expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “No you didn’t, love. She died in an accident.”

Zelda shook her head, her eyes still staring straight ahead. “It wasn’t an accident.”

“She fell down the steps. You were nowhere near when it happened – you were with _me,_ at the Academy.”

“It was my fault,” insisted Zelda. “It was my punishment.”

It didn’t make sense, and yet she could tell from the borrowed guilt that clenched around her stomach that Zelda believed what she was trying to say. “I don’t understand Zelds – your punishment for what?”

“From the Dark Lord. He asked a dark devotion of me and I-” Zelda’s hand shook so violently that her cigarette fell to the floor. It rolled across the wooden boards of the porch. Hilda stamped it out before it could cause any damage. “I couldn—I wouldn’t submit. And in punishment for my disobedience, he killed her.”

She reached out a hand to steady Zelda’s trembling one. Her sister’s body was tight with tension. She thought back to her own dark devotion: the Dark Lord’s sudden appearance. The cajoling that had morphed into insistence when she had hesitated. The sick realisation that the signing away of her soul had not been a merely a quaint coming-of-age tradition, but a very real contract with very real consequences.

“What did he ask you to do?”

Zelda’s hand clenched. “I can’t tell you – it's forbidden.” Her eyes flicked momentarily to Hilda’s face. Hesitant, as though afraid of what she might find.

“Quite right,” said Hilda, squeezing her hand reassuringly. “I shouldn’t have asked.” It must have been something much harder than pressing a button on a box if Zelda, who even at that young age had been meticulously devout, had been unwilling.

They sat in silence for a moment, watching the morning mist crawl across the lawn. “Did you do it in the end?” Hilda asked. “Whatever it was the Dark Lord asked of you?”

“Of course,” said Zelda. Her jaw clenched tightly, the tendons in her neck rippling.

Their mother’s death was too long ago for her to feel shocked or saddened by the news. She felt for Zelda, though. Zelda whose chilled hand was clutched between her own. Zelda’s whose guilt was still real and raw and consuming her from the inside. Poor Zelda who had to learn such a harsh lesson at such a young age.

“They say that the Dark Lord asks the greatest sacrifices of those on whom he bestows the greatest gifts,” she reminded her, hoping the platitude rang less hollow in Zelda’s ears than it did in her own.

“He knew that my loyalty to him was divided,” Zelda said bitterly. Waves of her shame crawled across Hilda’s skin. “He wanted to teach me that I must love him ahead of all others.”

Love. It seemed such an odd word to use. How could one describe their feelings toward a being who would test them so cruelly as love? Although she supposed that their father had equated fear and obedience with love. Perhaps it wasn’t so strange that Zelda had learnt to do the same.

“I still want you to stay,” she reassured her.

Zelda turned, finally, to look at her. There was fear and hope in her eyes. Hilda insisted: “It wasn’t your fault – you weren’t to know what would happen.” She remembered Zelda’s animal screams the day they had found their mother – the sound of something breaking irreparably. “I’m just sorry that you had to pay such a high price.”

Zelda withdrew her hand and busied herself with lighting another cigarette. Hilda waited while she sparked it alight and took a couple of deep drags. She could sense things moving within Zelda – thoughts and feelings ebbing and coalescing. She was learning that Zelda herself struggled to make sense of what she was feeling. She needed time to order the swirling sea inside her. There was no sense in rushing her.

“It is hard being here,” she said eventually, blowing a plume of smoke towards the woods. “Memories that I had forgotten keep coming back to me. Sometimes I feel as though the past is swallowing me.”

Hilda ached to reach for her again, but she was fearful that Zelda couldn’t tolerate the contact at that moment. Instead she said “I found the same when I came back to look after Father. I saw the past differently as an adult – I realised that some of the things I had accepted without question deserved to be questioned. And do you know what else I realised?”

“What?” asked Zelda, turning to face her again.

“How different things would have been without you. You always protected me.”

“I tried,” Zelda whispered, her eyes shining. “I was always afraid that you would get hurt because of me. Especially after what happened to Mother.”

Hilda’s fingers traced the jade amulet that she wore pinned to her cardigan. It hummed, the protection spell still powerful. “That’s why you stayed away,” she said, the realisation washing over her. Zelda had disappeared from their lives out of a misguided attempt to prevent another such tragedy from occurring.

Zelda nodded. “I thought the best way to keep you safe was to devote myself to the Dark Lord – to ensure that I never give him reason to doubt my loyalty again.”

“I thought you left because of me,” Hilda admitted, wiping away tears. “I thought I had done something wrong.” How many nights had she cried herself asleep wondering what she had done to offend her sister so?

“No,” said Zelda, her eyes widening in shock. “No Hildie, you could never—” She swallowed. When she spoke again her voice was rough. “I’m sorry you thought that.”

“But you did – you watched over me sometimes, didn’t you? I saw you – other people saw you.”

Zelda nodded. “I needed to make sure you were well. And I missed you,” she admitted shyly. “I missed you terribly.”

“What a pair we are,” she said with a sad smile. She wove a hand into Zelda’s hair and drew her towards her until their foreheads were touching.

They had rested like this in the darkness of night, when Zelda needed comfort that she didn't know how to ask for, but never during the day. Zelda gasped at the intimacy and then exhaled slowly, relaxing into it. After a moment she raised her hand and gripped Hilda’s forearm, holding her in place.

“Please stay,” Hilda murmured, the words vibrating in the air between them. “Whatever the future brings, we’ll face it together.”

Zelda’s forehead moved ever so slightly against hers. A nod. Hilda sighed contentedly.

They were interrupted by heavy footsteps. Hilda looked up to see Edward climbing the stairs to the house, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat.

Zelda rose to her feet, swiping at her cheeks. “I need to wash my face,” she muttered, rushing into the house before Edward could see her reddened eyes.

“Good morning sister,” he said when he reached the top of the stairs.

“Good morning.” She bent down to pick up the half dozen cigarette butts that Zelda had left scattered on the ground and slipped them into her pocket.

“Did I see Zelda with you just now?”

Hilda nodded. “She was getting chilled. She went inside to warm up.”

“How is she today?”

“A little better, I think.”

“Have you been crying, Hilda?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Yes,” she admitted. “But good tears. Nothing to worry about.”

He nodded, not looking entirely convinced.

“Where have you been so early on a Saturday?”

“To the Academy.”

Hilda smiled. They were both being as cagey as each other. “I was about to make breakfast. Have you eaten?”

Edward shook his head. “Not yet. Before you cook, would you help me with something?”

“Of course, what is it?”

He withdrew his hands from his pockets. The knuckles of his right hand were wrapped in a handkerchief. He unwound the stained white cloth, revealing bloodied knuckles. “Do you have anything for this?”

“Edward!” she gasped, stepping closer and taking his hand in her so she could examine it more closely. “What happened?”

“I spoke with Faustus.”

She looked up to find his expression as grim as his tone. “Come inside,” she said, leading him towards the door.

* * *

“What happened?” she asked again as she washed Edward’s injured knuckles in witch hazel. They were sitting in the kitchen, a basin of warm water and an array of balms laid out on the table in front of them.

Edward glanced upward briefly, as though he feared Zelda might hear them through the ceiling. “It is not my story to tell. Suffice it to say that they _did_ meet in the woods at Samhain. And on seeing Zelda’s distress, instead of doing his duty as a priest Faustus sought to use the situation for his own…gratification.” Edward spat the words with venom.

“He told you as much?” Hilda asked, rinsing the witch hazel away with warm water and patting his hands dry. It was hard to imagine Faustus admitting as much.

“Not at first. He spun me a line about offering her spiritual counsel. All very plausible – very proper.”

“Why didn’t you believe him?”

“Because _you_ didn’t.” She looked up at him, surprised at the simplicity of his response. “I trust your instincts, Hilda – you understand people better than anyone else I know.”

She felt her cheeks warm at the compliment. She turned away so that he wouldn’t see, busying herself applying a salve to his bruised and split knuckles – the same balm she had applied to the wounds on Zelda’s back the night before.

Edward hissed as the balm touched his damaged skin. Zelda hadn’t even flinched. “I’ve always thought Faustus was devoted to his role. It never occurred to me that he would abuse his position for his own ends. And not even for advancement – just for _pleasure_.”

“He’s hardly the first High Priest to do that,” Hilda said. She finished working on Edward’s hand and washed her own in the basin.

He sighed. He looked dejected, like a boy who has just discovered that his father is fallible. “I’ve learnt more about the Satanic Church from you in the course of the last day than I have in a century of ministry.”

“Perhaps you just weren’t ready to learn it until now,” she suggested, packing her supplies back in their basket.

“I’m still not sure I’m ready.”

“You are,” Hilda reassured him. “And you - a high priest from a prominent coven - are in a unique position to do something about it. Don’t waste this opportunity, Edward.”

He smiled. “You are wise and terrifying in equal measure, Hilda. He is a fool who crosses you.”

She busied herself putting the medical supplies back in the pantry cabinet so that he couldn’t see how flustered she was by his praise. When she returned to the kitchen Zelda had come downstairs. Her face was made up and her hair freshly curled. Her starched collar sat neatly atop her severe black dress. Aside from the way she grasped her fingers tightly in front of her, there was nothing to suggest that she was not every inch the calm, demure witch.

“Good morning, brother,” she said. Hilda wondered if Edward saw the uncertainty in her eyes.

“Good morning sister. You look well today.” Edward rose from the table, tucking his right hand into his pocket. “I was about to say morning prayers. Would you care to join me?”

A pleased smile curled at the corners of Zelda’s mouth. “Very well.”

Hilda watched fondly as they walked through to the parlour, Edward’s hand hovering protectively over Zelda’s back.

* * *

The sun had shone that morning for the first time in weeks, bathing the forests in dappled spring light that made lily of the valley shine brilliant white on the forest floor. The coven had met a little before noon, each person arriving laden with baskets of food and drink. Hilda had always loved the hare moon celebration. It wasn’t strictly a Satanic festival at all – simply an acknowledgement of nature moving through its cycles. She liked the flowers and the women’s voices joined in song and the fluffy rabbit. She liked the eating and talking that followed – a feast, for once, which involved no blood and required no sacrifice.

She had persuaded Zelda to allow her to alter one of her Moscow dresses for the occasion: had taken a beautiful sheath of Irish lace from an old summer dress and laid it over a shift of moss green chiffon that brought out the colour of her eyes. Zelda had complained about the unnecessary extravagance of it – _It is a picnic sister, not a banquet. Whatever I wear will end up creased and muddy before the day is out_ \- but Hilda had caught her preening before the mirror that morning.

They saw less of each other these days. Edward had enlisted Zelda’s help at the Academy – translating and preparing commentaries on the rare manuscripts that Cassius acquired on his buying expeditions. _It would be criminal not to put your talents to good use, sister_. Zelda thrived under the structure that her new role provided. She worked long days in the Academy library, conducting her research with rigour. Already Edward and Zelda had published several articles based on her research. There was talk of Zelda presenting a paper at a conference in the summer, and of teaching a class to some of the more advanced students the following fall.

When Zelda was at home she was calmer – less prone to dark moods and self-isolation. Often they sat together in the evenings: Hilda knitting while Zelda read. At the weekends they ran errands in Greendale and worked side by side in the greenhouse. They gossiped and reminisced and laughed at the absurdities of coven politics. At some point, without either of them noticing quite when, Zelda had stopped feeling like an outsider and Hilda had stopped fearing that she would flee again.

Hilda thought about this as she packed up the last of the picnic baskets from the hare moon meal – how far they had come from that first difficult year after Zelda returned to Greendale. The ritual and the meal were long dispensed with. Late afternoon sun sliced through the trees, gilding groups of witches and warlocks sprawled on blankets and cushions, talking and laughing over glasses of punch. She glanced around the clearing, looking for her brother and sister.

Edward was moving from group to group, thanking them for coming. He looked trim and elegant in an ivory linen suit. Zelda still sat with the same clique from the Academy that she had eaten with. They had spent the meal engaged in an animated discussion about the Mesopotamian concept of the netherworld. Something, Hilda had gathered, to do with a text Edward had asked them to work on that shed new light on the issue. It was a subject matter than Hilda neither knew much about nor cared to, so when she had finished her lunch she had drifted off to mingle with the rest of the coven.

Now she wondered back over to Zelda’s little group. They were still talking – although the subject matter seemed to have shifted to hermeticism.

“Our perceptions of the tradition are coloured by the sources we use to interpret its principles,” Zelda was saying. “If someone were to attempt a truly Satanic reading, we may find it holds more value than is commonly believed.”

“Perhaps that might be a next project for you, Sister?” suggested Brother Lovecraft. “After you have finished challenging our understanding of ancient Middle Easter cosmology.”

“If you haven’t been headhunted by the Necroplis by then,” added Sister Highsmith.

“Hell forbid,” said Zelda. “It might yield new insight, but I have no desire to devote the next few decades of _my_ life to it.”

“You’re not still talking about work are you?” asked Hilda. “This is supposed to be a holiday.”

“All the more reason to spend it discussing something stimulating,” responded Sister Highsmith, lighting a cigarette. Hilda had noticed that quite a few members of the coven had taken up smoking in the last few months. It seemed particularly popular among the women.

“Speaking of which,” said Brother Lovecraft, “Father Blackwood has made arrangements for festivities to continue with an orgy at Dorian’s this evening. I trust you will all be attending, sisters?”

Hilda saw Zelda’s gaze dart across the clearing, to where Faustus Blackwood stood surrounded by a group of half a dozen simpering witches. She had noticed that Zelda avoided interaction with Faustus Blackwood, and that on the rare occasions when their paths crossed at coven events Edward contrived never to leave them alone.

“Of course, Howard,” said Sister Highsmith. “It is tradition after all.”

“And you, Zelda? Hilda?” he enquired.

Zelda shook her head. “Another time. We have our own plans.”

Hilda breathed a sigh of relief. She hated orgies – the smell and the mess and the indiscriminate carnality of it all.

“Typical” she heard Sister Highsmith mutter under her breath.

Zelda ignored the comment. “We mustn’t keep you,” she told them. “I wouldn’t want you to miss out on our account.”

They went their separate ways – their companions to join the group heading to Dorian’s and Hilda and Zelda towards home. Hilda threaded her arm through Zelda’s as they walked back through the woods, enjoying the last of the sun. “Brother Lovecraft was disappointed that you weren’t going with them. He has a soft spot for you, you know.”

“I’d noticed. He’s hardly discrete about it.”

“Don’t you like him?”

Zelda snorted. “Howard?”

“He’s very intelligent,” Hilda pointed out.

“That may be so, but he has all the looks and charm of a mollusc.”

“Oh Zelda,” Hilda giggled. “You _are_ wicked.”

“Thank you, sister.”

“So,” she bumped Zelda with her shoulder, “what plans _do_ we have for this evening?”

“Well, there is a full moon,” Zelda pointed out. “And a clear sky. I thought we could sit out and watch the moonrise.”

“Oh," Hilda smiled at the simplicity of the suggestion. "Well that sounds lovely. I’ll make us some cocoa shall I? Maybe some nice macarons to go with it?”

“Please Hilda, no more food. I ate my own bodyweight at the picnic.”

But when it came to it, Zelda found room for a mug of cocoa and a biscuit. They spread a blanket on the lawn and sprawled out under the dusky twilight sky. Bats skimmed low over their heads, hunting for insects in the half light.

It was April and the nights were still cool. They sat close beside each other, a blanket draped over their knees and steaming mugs cradled in their hands. They watched silently as the sky darkened and the stars started to appear, glistening jewels on a velvet cloth. Above the rustle of trees owls called to each other and Vinegar Tom barked as he scented some prey down by the tree line.

“It’s been a beautiful day, hasn’t it?” Hilda asked.

“Quite lovely,” agreed Zelda.

The moon rose above the trees, a fierce white goddess moving through the sky, and Hilda realised that this – this moment – was what she had spent all those years searching for. She glanced at Zelda. Her face was turned upwards, its planes transfigured by silver light. A deep sense of peace settled in Hilda's body, like the moment between sleep and waking.

Zelda turned and smiled at her. Hilda smiled back and rested her head on Zelda’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of her hair. Whatever their future held, they would always have this moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story ends a bit more softly than I originally planned. After all I've put them through, I found myself wanting to allow Hilda, Zelda and Edward a moment of happiness before canon messes up their lives again.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has been following, leaving kudos and commenting. Your support is very much appreciated, and I have incorporated a few ideas I got from comments into the plot along the way.
> 
> I'm toying with the idea of making this the first part of a series, with some shorter pieces showing events during the timeline of this story from Zelda's perspective. Let me know if there would be any interest in reading that.


End file.
